Identifying intracity freight trip ends from heavy truck GPS trajectories

TL;DR

This paper presents a data-driven method for accurately identifying freight trip ends from heavy truck GPS data by dynamically setting thresholds and considering urban context, achieving 87.45% accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces an objective, dynamic threshold-based approach that incorporates urban freight context, improving trip end identification accuracy over previous subjective methods.

Findings

Achieved 87.45% accuracy in trip end identification.

Effectively distinguishes temporary stops from freight trip ends.

Reflects spatial distribution and chain patterns of intracity freight trips.

Abstract

Intracity heavy truck freight trips are basic data in city freight system planning and management. In the big data era, massive heavy truck GPS trajectories can be acquired cost effectively in real-time. Identifying freight trip ends (origins and destinations) from heavy truck GPS trajectories is an outstanding problem. Although previous studies proposed a variety of trip end identification methods from different perspectives, these studies subjectively defined key threshold parameters and ignored the complex intracity heavy truck travel characteristics. Here, we propose a data-driven trip end identification method in which the speed threshold for identifying truck stops and the multilevel time thresholds for distinguishing temporary stops and freight trip ends are objectively defined. Moreover, an appropriate time threshold level is dynamically selected by considering the intracity activity patterns of heavy trucks. Furthermore, we use urban road networks and point-of-interest (POI) data to eliminate misidentified trip ends to improve method accuracy. The validation results show that the accuracy of the method we propose is 87.45%. Our method incorporates the impact of the city freight context on truck trajectory characteristics, and its results can reflect the spatial distribution and chain patterns of intracity heavy truck freight trips, which have a wide range of practical applications.