Studying Intercity Travels and Traffic Using Cellular Network Data

We use anonymized mobile phone CDR (call detail record) dataset provided by Orange D4D and crowdsourced OpenStreetMap data to study people’s intercity travels and traffic speed on intercity highways in Ivory Coast. Knowledge about people’s intercity travel behaviour and speed on highways would help government officers such as transportation strategic planners make informed development decisions. It is also very valuable to end users who would like to understand the traffic situation to avoid traffic jams or slow speed time. We design algorithms and implement a system that discovers people’s intercity trips and extracts intercity travel trajectories suitable for estimating traffic speed on intercity highways. The data and results are visualized using a visualization engine we developed for this project. Besides describing our ideas and system, we in this paper also present our analysis results of intercity travels and highway traffic.