Expanding the Uses of Truck GPS Data in Freight Modeling and Planning Activities

Progress in practical applications of large, passively collected data sets is often hindered by the lack of appropriate analytical tools or the proprietary nature of applicable software. One of the most widely used data sources in the United States is truck GPS data that are commercially available from a few sources nationwide. Although many large GPS data sets are used in the development of tour-based truck models, the development of a fairly general approach to data analysis and processing that can be readily applied to various GPS data sets without need of proprietary software is still of interest. First, this paper presents a set of tools and techniques used to transform low-frequency truck GPS data available from commercial sources into complete trajectories on the network, that is, sequences of links constituting continuous paths traversed by each truck, with corresponding time stamps on each of the nodes. For this exercise, only open-source software was used, and the algorithm implementation was released as an open-source tool under a business-friendly license. Second, use of the truck GPS data was expanded beyond the standard extraction of trip matrices and estimation of tour models. Additional applications include select link analysis, time-of-day analysis, and trajectory data visualization.