Development of a System for Collecting Loop-Detector Event Data for Individual Vehicles

Typical freeway inductive loop detection systems, under normal operation, aggregate individual loop-detector actuations sampled at 60 Hz into 20-s or 30-s averages of velocity, flow, and lane-occupancy measurements. While such aggregations are appropriate for serving as inputs to control system algorithms, and they save disk space for archiving loop data, a large amount of useful data regarding individual vehicles is lost. For single-loop detectors, the lost information includes individual vehicle arrival, departure, and presence times. For speed traps, the lost information also includes the calculated individual vehicle speed and length. Yet this information about individual vehicles is desirable to transportation researchers and planners. The unavailability of this information makes in-depth investigation of detector errors difficult or even impossible. A system for collecting detector event data is proposed. This system can sample loop actuations with sampling rates of 60 Hz or higher and then save, process, and present the collected event data in real time without interfering with the detector controller’s normal operation. A stand-alone Windows program was developed for performing real-time high-frequency loop event data collection. A system reliability test and field application indicate that the system can collect realtime detector event data at a high sampling rate (60 Hz or higher). Additionally, this system makes real-time loop data quality evaluation, loop malfunction identification, and loop error correction feasible.