Connected Vehicles Are Now Abolishing the Conventional Traffic Measuring Tools

Advanced traffic control and management strategies rely either on the real-time measurements or on the estimates of the macroscopic traffic variables. While for many years loop detectors have been the widespread sensing tools, capable of measuring flow and occupancy, connected vehicle data has emerged as a new data source for traffic measuring and estimation. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the loop detectors in urban networks can be eliminated and the necessary measurements can be retrieved from connected vehicle data based on the proposed modeling approach. The proposed methodology is tested and validated with promising results.