Routing Service Quality -- Local Driver Behavior Versus Routing Services

Mobile location-based services is a very successful class of services that are being used frequently by users with GPS-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones. This paper presents a study of how to exploit GPS trajectory data, which is available in increasing volumes, for the assessment of the quality of one kind of location-based service, namely routing services. Specifically, the paper presents a framework that enables the comparison of the routes provided by routing services with the actual driving behaviors of local drivers. Comparisons include route length, travel time, and also route popularity, which are enabled by common driving behaviors found in available trajectory data. The ability to evaluate the quality of routing services enables service providers to improve the quality of their services and enables users to identify the services that best serve their needs. The paper covers experiments with real vehicle trajectory data and an existing online navigation service. It is found that the availability of information about previous trips enables better prediction of route travel time and makes it possible to provide the users with more popular routes than does a conventional navigation service.