ABAFT: an adaptive weight-based fusion technique for travel time estimation using multi-source data with different confidence and spatial coverage

The evolution of traffic monitoring systems provides rich traffic data from multiple sensors. Fuzing the data has the potential to enhance the quality of travel time estimation. It also provides better spatial-temporal coverage in traffic observations. However, each sensor’s unique data collection process results in fusion challenges with respect to the coverage and data quality differences between various sources. These factors determine the degree of confidence that should be considered when fuzing different types of data. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive weight-based fusion technique (ABAFT) that considers data spatial coverage and quality or confidence as the factors constructing the weight. The proposed ABAFT was tested using different scenarios on synthetic GPS and Bluetooth MAC Scanners data from an urban arterial corridor. The results show that the ABAFT can increase the travel time estimation accuracy by over 10%, and reliability by over 8% compared to the single sensor estimators. It also outperforms the simple average and standard-error-based fusion by around 4%. ABAFT is easy to be implemented on multiple sources of information available to transport agencies for a single point of truth.