Bluetooth Data in an Urban Context: Retrieving Vehicle Trajectories

Bluetooth sensors have recently been developed throughout the world for traffic information gathering. Primarily designed for travel time analysis, this article presents a method for vehicular trajectories retrieval. After a short description of some of the challenges at hand in using Bluetooth data in an urban network, a procedure to extract trip information from such data is proposed. It is further analyzed and illustrated at work on a real dataset collected in Brisbane. Last, this article shows that using spatially constrained shortest path analysis, this trip information, once extracted, can be used for the reconstruction of the trajectories. The performance of the process is assessed using both a simulated dataset and one from the real-world acquired in Brisbane, showing encouraging results, with up to 84% of accurately recovered trajectories.