Process commercial GPS data to develop a web-based truck performance measures program’, Paper 11-1932

Although trucks move larger volumes of goods than other modes of transportation, public agencies know little about their travel patterns and how the roadway network performs for trucks. Trucking companies use global positioning systems (GPS) from commercial vendors to dispatch and track their equipment. This research collected these GPS data from approximately 2,500 trucks in the Puget Sound region and evaluated the feasibility of processing these data to support a statewide network performance measures program. The program monitors truck travel time and system reliability, and will guide freight investment decisions by public agencies. While other studies have used a limited number of project-specific GPS devices to collect frequent location reads, permitting a fine-grained analysis of specific roadway segments, this study used data that involved less frequent reads but were collected from a larger number of trucks for over a year. The research team used automated processing to clean and format the data because they included millions of data points. Because a performance measurement program ultimately monitors trips generated by trucks as the