Travel Time Reliability Estimation in Urban Road Networks: Utilization of Statistics Distribution and Tensor Decomposition

The travel time reliability (TTR) is crucial for evaluating the reliability of road networks, but real traffic data is often incomplete and sparse. This study validates that road network TTR conforms to a normal distribution and devises a quantification approach for road network TTR. Two reliability estimation methods are tailored for two data sources: section detectors and mobile detectors. Simulation experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of these methods. The study emphasizes that the TTR estimation method using traffic section data (S-TTR), which is based on the verified normal distribution assumption, maintains average absolute errors below 10%. On the other hand, the TTR estimation method that utilizes sparse trajectory data (T-TTR), which relies on tensor decomposition, proficiently fills in all missing data with an average error of 0.0059.