Segmenting Highway Network Based on Speed Profiles

GPS Data from vehicles making trips on the highway are a valuable source of information for highway data analytics. In this article we propose an algorithm for segmenting the highway network into homogenous stretches in terms of vehicle speed profiles. We have GPS data of trucks plying across India, transmitted at an interval of 10 minutes, for thousands of trips. We identify break-points for individual trips and then cluster those break-points to obtain highway segment ends. We calculate the average velocity of vehicles traversing the regions between these segment ends, i.e. the highway segments. Then we merge the segments using an iterative minimum difference merging algorithm. The segments obtained thus are meaningful and may be utilized in optimal trip planning, infrastructure management and other decision making tasks.