Big Data for Traffic Estimation and Prediction: A Survey of Data and Tools

TL;DR

This survey reviews how big data and open data sources are utilized with various tools to estimate and predict traffic states, aiming to enhance transportation efficiency.

Contribution

It provides an up-to-date categorization of data types and tools used in traffic estimation and prediction, along with challenges and future directions.

Findings

Categorizes different data sources used in traffic analysis.

Introduces open-source tools for traffic estimation and prediction.

Discusses challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Big data has been used widely in many areas including the transportation industry. Using various data sources, traffic states can be well estimated and further predicted for improving the overall operation efficiency. Combined with this trend, this study presents an up-to-date survey of open data and big data tools used for traffic estimation and prediction. Different data types are categorized and the off-the-shelf tools are introduced. To further promote the use of big data for traffic estimation and prediction tasks, challenges and future directions are given for future studies.