A statistical approach to quantify the reliability of travel time for trip planning purposes

Abstract

Decision making associated with effective trip planning depends on the total time taken to complete a trip. Route choice, departure time and travel mode are mainly the critical decisions made based on travel time estimations before the departure. With technological advancements, inventions such as web maps, sensor-based Internet-of-Things and Vehicleto- Everything communication have become emerging traffic data providers for the travellers intending to observe the realtime traffic conditions along with travel time estimation between the desired origin-destination pair for a specific departure time and a route. However, as there is some level of uncertainty due to the changes in traffic and roadside conditions, the estimations tend to deviate from the actual time of arrival. This study is focused on addressing the reliability of travel times and developing a methodology to compute and present the reliability as a quantity to the user to make decisions. As a demonstration study, alternative routes between a fixed origin-destination pair were selected. A dummy database of travel times was obtained through Google Maps for the analysis. A mathematical algorithm was developed to quantify the travel time reliability for user-defined scenarios on a selected route. This quantitative value of reliability assists travellers to plan trips effectively.