Exploiting Real-Time Traffic Light Scheduling with Taxi Traces

Traffic lights in urban area can significantly influence the efficiency and effectiveness of transportation. The real-time scheduling information of traffic lights is fundamentally important for many intelligent transportation applications, such as shortest-time navigation and green driving advisory. However, existing traffic light scheduling identification systems either entail dedicated infrastructures or depend on specialized traffic traces, which hinders the popularity and real world deployment. Differently, we propose to identify real-time traffic light scheduling by analyzing taxi traces that are widely accessible from taxi companies. The key idea is to exploit the periodicity in traffic patterns, which is directly affected by traffic lights. We also develop advanced algorithms to identify red/green lights duration and signal change time. We evaluate our solution using over one billion taxi records from Shenzhen, China. The evaluation results validate the effectiveness of our system.