Estimating freeway travel time and its reliability using radar sensor data

Travel time and its reliability are intuitive system performance measures for freeway traffic operations. This paper proposes a method to estimate travel times based on data collected from roadside radar sensors, considering spatially correlated traffic conditions. Link-level and corridor-level travel time distributions are estimated using these travel time estimates and compared with the ones estimated based on probe vehicle data. The maximum likelihood estimation is used to estimate the parameters of Weibull, gamma, normal, and lognormal distributions. According to the log-likelihood values, lognormal distribution is the best fit among all the tested distributions. Corridor-level travel time reliability measures are extracted from the travel time distributions. The proposed travel time estimation model can well capture the temporal pattern of travel time and its distribution.