Freeway Travel Time Prediction and Route Recommendation via Cell Phone

This paper presents an innovative approach to improving the congestion problems on highways. The result provided below can benefit highway users and, therefore, is commercially appealing. Within the scope of this project, three different methods were developed to interpret Highway 401 (Toronto) data into expected travel time. MATLAB was used to retrieve real-time speed data from the ITS Center and Testbed (ICAT) platform at the University of Toronto and a linear interpolation over distance was used to calculate an estimated travel time. Given the algorithm and user inputs for the on-ramp and off-ramp locations, the program approximated the expected travel time from the origin to destination and also suggests whether to switch from “collector” to “express” lanes and where to do so to minimize the travel time. Finally, the project incorporated a significant inter-protocol development component, where a user interface was created with the use of wireless internet technology. With this service, having already departed, users can receive valuable information about their optimal travel route, by just specifying the on- and off-ramp locations on a wireless internet site accessible from their cell phones.