FLOATING OBSERVER INFORMATION PROCESSING ON THE BASIS OF MOBILE BLUETOOTH DATA

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) developed a new traffic monitoring approach (called DYNAMIC) which combines the advantages of Floating Car Data (FCD) and Floating Observer Data (FOD) principles by avoiding their drawbacks. Using DYNAMIC, spatiotemporal traffic data are obtained whereas the number of costly traffic detection infrastructure (e.g. mounted traffic sensors, detection gantries, etc.) is minimised or avoided at all. DYNAMIC is based on detections which are made by Floating Traffic Observers (FTO) using wireless radio-based technologies (e.g. Bluetooth/Wi-Fi) while passing other traffic objects (vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians). The DLR has a long experience with the processing and handling of traffic data like FCD to gain link based and network-wide travel times. The current DLR processing tools that support FCD have been extended to support the processing of Bluetooth data obtained from the floating (DYNAMIC approach) or static detection system. This work describes in detail the newly developed method to process the Bluetooth data and gives the results from conducted field-tests which had been performed to display applicability in a real environment