Coverage Without New Sensors: How Far Can Virtual Traffic Sensing Move the Data?
TL;DR for operators A traffic model can give an agency observations on roads where no detector exists, but pushing those observations farther across the network does not automatically make the resulting dataset more useful. Guastella et al. propose a simulation-driven augmentation method that assigns each physical traffic sensor to a distinct unsensored road edge with similar simulated traffic behavior.1 In Brussels, the shortest tested candidate range, one to five directed road-edge steps, produced the lowest errors. Under the paper’s strongest reported parameter setting for that range, RMSE reached 50.1 for one calibration strategy and 58.2 for the other. Repeated synthetic experiments in Namur also favored the one-to-five-hop range. ...