A novel arterial travel time distribution estimation model and its application to energy/emissions estimation

Arterial travel time information is crucial to advanced traffic management systems and advanced traveler information systems. An effective way to represent this information is the estimation of travel time distribution. In this paper, we develop a modified Gaussian mixture model in order to estimate link travel time distributions along arterial with signalized intersections. The proposed model is applicable to traffic data from either fixed-location sensors or mobile sensors. The model performance is validated using real-world traffic data (more than 1,400 vehicles) collected by the wireless magnetic sensors and digital image recognition in the field. The proposed model shows high potential (i.e., the correction rate are above 0.9) to satisfactorily estimate travel time statistics and classify vehicle stop versus non-stop movements. In addition, the resultant movement classification application can significantly improve the estimation of traffic-related energy and emissions along arterial.