Towards Congestion Detection in Transportation Networks Using GPS Data

The future Information Communication Technologies will allow the collection of a large amount of data on individual mobility. The data analysis will not only provide information on the human mobility peculiarities, but will also open new possibilities for studying the criticalities of a complex system. In Italy a sample of 2% of the vehicle population is monitored by a GPS system for insurance reason. We have analyzed the data in the metropolitan area of Rome for a whole month (May 2010) to reconstruct an empirical Fundamental Diagram based on the real time reconstruction of the speed, density and flux on the whole road network. The main difficulties are the low sampling rate of GPS data set and the heterogeneity of the road network in the metropolitan area of Rome and of the drivers’ behavior. We present the first results of this research discussing the future perspectives for prevention and governance of traffic congestions.