Skip to main content

Swarm data from mobile phone networks makes traffic flows more visible

Telecom subsidiary Motionlogic and software provider PTV Group have teamed up in a partnership in which Motionlogic provides traffic and people movement data, based on anonymised signal data from the mobile phone network. PTV Group then processes this data to provide urban transport planners with analysis that enables them to calibrate transport models and the current traffic situation and map travel demand in real time. In addition, there are also down-to-the-hour departure and arrival figures. By using
December 6, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
Telecom subsidiary Motionlogic and software provider 3264 PTV Group have teamed up in a partnership in which Motionlogic provides traffic and people movement data, based on anonymised signal data from the mobile phone network. PTV Group then processes this data to provide urban transport planners with analysis that enables them to calibrate transport models and the current traffic situation and map travel demand in real time.

In addition, there are also down-to-the-hour departure and arrival figures. By using these zone-by-zone traffic patterns, demand can be depicted not just as a day matrix, but in much more granular fashion, on an hourly basis.

For transport planners who require origin-destination data, the combination of floating phone data (FPD, in addition to FCD/floating car data) provides a better basis for planning and is less time-consuming and costly than traditional traffic surveys, says PTV.

For transport operators, the representation of travel demand in public transport enables actual demand behaviour can be detected, in order to use it to orient new concepts and provide customer-appropriate capacities.

The partnership has already been tested in a pilot project with a new transport model for the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. The next step will see the two companies will work together to output travel demand for different modes of transport separately.

Related Content

  • August 26, 2021
    PTV simulates York’s future
    PTV’s predictive software modelling is helping one of England’s historic cities to improve traffic flow
  • February 3, 2012
    Detection analysis technology successfully predicts traffic flows
    David Crawford investigates new detection analysis technology from IBM. Locations on both the East and West Coasts of the US are scheduled for early deployments of IBM's new Traffic Prediction Tool (TPT) statistical analysis model for the fine-time resolution and near-term prediction of road flow conditions. Developed by IBM's Watson Research Laboratories, TPT is designed to analyse data from the the key detection indicators - average vehicle volumes and speeds passing a location in a given time interval -
  • February 6, 2012
    Fiberlink Matrix 16x16 optical router
    The Communications Specialties 16x16 Fiberlink Matrix, model OM16, is part of the fully configurable and SMPTE-compliant Fiberlink Matrix family which has the ability to configure the number of inputs and outputs in any fashion up to 16x16 for model OM16 and up to 32x32 for model OM32.
  • March 19, 2014
    New opportunities in a data-rich future
    Jason Barnes looks at where the detection and monitoring sector is heading. In the future, there will be no such thing as an un-instrumented road. Just a short time ago, that could have been a quote from a high-level policy document but with the first arrivals of vehicles with 802.11p connectivity – the door-opener to Vehicle-to-X (V2X) applications – it’s a statement which has increasing validity. The technology which uses our roads will also provide information on road conditions but V2X isn’t the only