Proposal for a method to extract georeferenced locations from a road network for the analysis of GPS trajectories

Abstract

Context: Technological progress facilitates the recording and collection of GPS trajectory information. Nowadays it is possible to visualize in geographic information systems maps of road networks and analyze GPS trajectories of vehicles circulating in a city. The intelligent analysis of these data leads to the identification of patterns useful for making decisions in situations related to urban planning, transportation planning, traffic circulation and congestion, among others. Method: This work proposes a method for extracting georeferential locations from a road network that allows performing different analyses with data sets of vehicular GPS trajectories. For this purpose, QGIS, an open source Geographic Information System, and POSTGIS, which allows converting the PostgreSQL database management system into a spatial database, were used as tools. The method allows automating the process of extracting the georeferential locations of a road network that are loaded into a spatial database for further analysis with a set of GPS trajectories. Results: To validate this work, measurements were made of the number of records obtained by the method of extraction of georeferential locations and those obtained from the analysis, eight different queries were defined using the data sets of vehicular GPS trajectories of the cities of Guayaquil-Ecuador, Aracaju-Brazil and Beijing-China. Conclusions: The results obtained are favorable and show that the extraction method is efficient and allows different analyses of vehicular traffic in a city.