This work proposes the use of Information Theory for the characterization of vehicles behavior through their velocities. Three public data sets were used: (i) Mobile Century data set collected on Highway I-880, near Union City, California; (ii) Borlange GPS data set collected in the Swedish city of Borlange; and (iii) Beijing taxicabs data set collected in Beijing, China, where each vehicle speed is stored as a time series. The Bandt-Pompe methodology combined with the Complexity-Entropy plane were used to identify different regimes and behaviors. The global velocity is compatible with a correlated noise with f − k Power Spectrum with k ≥ 0. With this we identify traffic behaviors as, for instance, random velocities (k ≃ 0) when there is congestion, and more correlated velocities (k ≃ 3) in the presence of free traffic flow. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
In this paper we investigate from both a theoretical and a practical point of view the following problem: Let s be a function from [0;1] to [0;1] . Under which conditions does there exist a continuous function f from [0;1] to R such that the regularity of f at x , measured in terms of Holder exponent, is exactly s(x) , for all x ∈ [0;1] ? In this paper, we applied multifractal modeling techniques to analyze the traffic data collected from the Beijing Yuquanying. The results indicated that multifractal characteristics obviously exist in the traffic system; the degree of fractality of these traffic data tends to increase as the traffic system becomes congested; the Holder exponent that measures the local rate of fractality may be used as indicators to predict the presence of the traffic congestion.