Experimenting with real-time ATIS: Stepping forward from advance

In the early 1990's, an in-vehicle navigation and route guidance project called ADVANCE was conducted in the northeastern suburbs of Chicago. It proved that travel time data could be updated on in-vehicle devices (albeit not in real-time) to assist drivers in choosing faster routes to their destinations. This past spring, about a decade later, a more progressive but similar 3-month field experiment was conducted in upstate New York. Nearly 200 participants used state-of-the-art, in-vehicle navigation and route guidance technology in conjunction with GPS tracking and broadband wireless to share travel time data and pick the shortest paths through a congested network. The route guidance devices observed travel times, uploaded them to a central server that updated a travel time database, and then downloaded every minute to each of the probe vehicles to ensure the latest travel time information was being used while enroute. The experiment resulted in a total of 4,111,210 latitude-longitude position/ speed/ time points. The largest number of location points per user was 98,018 while the smallest was 117; the average per user was just over 26,000 location points, or 325.5 points per trip. There were 12,629 probe trips for a traveled distance of 147,316 miles over a duration of 3,945.8 hours. This paper presents a discussion of the Capital District ATIS project including the parallels and differences with the ADVANCE effort. Areas covered are: travel time data, project background, description of the study area, participant statistics, experiment design, sample results, and a summary with future research directions. Copyright ASCE 2006.