Traffic congestion became one of the most important concerns of people living in large cities. Any initiative aiming at understanding and predicting traffic congestion requires the analysis and monitoring of the traffic flow. The implementation of traffic monitoring systems, however, requires a considerable amount of investment in equipment and qualified personnel to simply get data. Investments are even greater when it is necessary to process and analyze the data and produce information that supports operational measures, public policies, and investments in infrastructure. In order to reduce the cost of collecting information on traffic flows, this paper presents a methodology to monitor any area of the road network based on information gathered from free internet services. Monitoring points are set automatically along the roads in the vicinity of the event. The data are processed to present the analysis of the influence of the event on the traffic flow. The system was evaluated with real data collected from Web mapping service, demonstrating the viability and potential of the proposed solution. In addition, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the quality of data obtained through Web mapping services when compared with data obtained from active radars installed along the route.
['Alan Miranda Monteiro de Lima', 'Jorge Campos']
Evaluating the use of traffic information from Web map services to analyze the impact of non-recurrent events