Vehicular crowd-sensing with high-mileage vehicles: investigating spatio-temporal coverage dynamics in historical cities with complex urban road networks

Abstract

Background. Vehicular Crowd-Sensing (VCS) can be a cost-effective solution to gather data in urban environments, leveraging the onboard sensors of modern vehicles moving around the city. Many experimental studies have proven that high-mileage vehicles, such as taxis, can be effectively used for VCS. However, these studies have been mostly carried out in cities with regular, grid-based, road networks. Conversely, little work has been conducted to assess the suitability of VCS in cities with more complex urban road networks, such as historical ones.

Goal. As a step towards filling this gap, the present study investigates the feasibility of using different-sized fleets of taxis to crowd-sense information in the urban areas of the historical cities of Porto (Portugal) and Rome (Italy), whose road networks evolved over the centuries and features a complex topology.

Data and Methodology. This work leverages massive real-world datasets of taxi trajectories collected over three contiguous weeks in the cities of Porto and Rome to estimate the spatio-temporal coverage achievable by different-sized fleets of taxis if they were used for VCS. Indeed, using these trajectories, several simulations were conducted, considering four sizes of taxi fleets, ranging from 50 to 400 vehicles, for both cities. The achievable spatio-temporal road network coverage metrics were computed at a fine-grained scale of single road segments.

Results. Results show that the achievable coverage in both historical cities exhibits very similar trends, with as few as 50 vehicles being capable of visiting a relevant part of the road network at least once in the considered time frame. As expected, increasing the number of involved vehicles improves spatial and temporal coverage. Still, time gaps between subsequent visits can be possibly inadequate for some VCS use cases. As a consequence, recruiting more vehicles and/or devising specialized routing/incentivization mechanisms might be necessary to achieve more comprehensive coverage of the urban road network.

Data and Code

Data and code to replicate the findings in this study are available at the public DOI .