Transportation mode-based segmentation and classification of movement trajectories

The knowledge of the transportation mode used by humans (e. g. bicycle, on foot, car, and train) is critical for travel behaviour research, transport planning and traffic management. Nowadays, new technologies such as the GPS have replaced traditional survey methods (paper diaries, telephone) since they are more accurate and problems such as underreporting are avoided. However, although the movement data collected (timestamped positions in digital form) have generally high accuracy, they do not contain the transportation mode. We present in this paper a new method for segmenting movement data into single-mode segments and to classify them according to the transportation mode used. Our fully automatic method differs from previous attempts for five reasons: (1) it relies on fuzzy concepts found in expert systems, i. e. membership functions and certainty factors; (2) it uses OpenStreetMap data to help the segmentation and classification process; (3) we can distinguish between 10 transportation modes (incl. between tram, bus, and car) and we propose a hierarchy; (4) it handles data with signal shortages and noise, and other real-life situations; (5) in our implementation, there is a separation between the reasoning and the knowledge, so that users can easily modify the parameters used and add new transportation modes. We have implemented the method and tested it with a 17-million point dataset collected in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. The accuracy of the classification with the developed prototype, determined with the comparison of the classified results with the reference data derived from manual classification, is 91.6 percent.