A Three-step General Map Matching Method in the GIS Environment: Travel/Transportation Study Perspective

Despite its application in many fields, map matching in travel/transport geography study is unique in two aspects: 1) The correct road links traversed by the traveler need to be unambiguously identified; 2) All the identified links should form a meaningful travel route. This paper discusses the application of map matching methodologies in the context of deriving people’s travel behavior from GPS-traced multi-modal trip data within the GIS environment. In recognition of the disadvantages associated with the existing mapmatching algorithms, this research proposed and implemented in ARCGIS a heterogeneous map matching approach suitable for travel/activity research needs which is uniquely characterized by: 1) data preprocessing with point cluster reduction and density leverage; 2) offering the candidate solution within a pool of “the best”; 3) the balancing of matching results from multiple matching factors with rank aggregation; 4) Intelligently utilizing the basic network constraint attributes with “expert rules” to increase the matching accuracy; and 5) Dempster belief test to discern the noise and off-road travel. Our analysis has shown that the performance of the new algorithm is comparable with the others when the candidate pool size is small and network/GPS trace size is large. Further research needs to quantify the performance of this algorithm and others with respect to a complete set of survey travel routes recorded