Incident detection on urban roads - A case study using synthetic floating car data

Within the scope of this paper we examine incident detection on inner-city roads using floating car data (FCD) under different traffic conditions and data qualities. We used synthetic FCD to analyze incidents under variable conditions, such as different traffic volumes. They are generated from microscopic traffic flow simulations with the software tool PTV Vissim. Automated processing of the synthetic FCD gained from the microsimulation models also makes it possible to analyze different data qualities resulting from the choice of penetration rate and transmission frequency. We investigated the recognizability of the incidents using five laboratory examples, which depict different traffic incidents, and a real inner-city road in Karlsruhe, Germany. Graphical and quantitative evaluations are used for incident detection, whereby violin plots and the proposed incident indicator have the most reliable detection rate. Incident detection decreases significantly if several incidents overlap, the severity of the incidents or the traffic volume is reduced, the data quality decreases, or if there is no current speed information in the data. For additional insights, we recommend considering the different figures created in the graphical analysis alongside the incident indicator used in the quantitative analysis.