A Survey on the Advancement of Travel Time Estimation Using Mobile Phone Network Data

The fast development of information and communication technologies has engendered a massive generation of mobile data with great potential for extracting mobility patterns and sensing urban dynamics. The data, itself, has unique characteristics depending on the technology and the network coverage design for different zones (urban-rural). Therefore, many research directions investigated the potential of such data to extract some important features of traffic information, such as travel time estimation, traffic flow, etc. From this perspective, our paper focuses on highlighting the advancements done during the last twenty years concerning the usage of mobile phone network data to estimate vehicles’ travel time in different geographical conditions. Furthermore, it discusses and covers the existing literature methods and the challenges they face due to the nature of the data, its quality, and its complexity. Finally, we reveal the main trends and directions for future work.