A Method of Generating Traffic Travel Information Based on the Loop Detector Data from COSMOS

Many urban cities deployed ITS technologies to improve the efficiency of traffic operation and management including a real-time franc control system (i.e., COSMOS). The system adopted loop detector system to collect traffic information such as volume, occupancy time, degree of saturation, and queue length. This paper investigated the applicability of detector information within COSMOS to represent the congestion level of the links. Initially, link travel times obtained from the field study were related with each of detector information. Results showed that queue length was highly correlated with link travel time, and direct link travel time estimation using the spot speed data produced high estimation error rates. From this analysis, a procedure was proposed to estimate congestion level of the links using both degree of saturation and queue length information.