A High-Efficiency Method of Mobile Positioning Based on Commercial Vehicle Operation Data

Abstract: Commercial vehicle operation (CVO) has been a popular application of intelligent transportation systems. Location determination and route tracing of an on-board unit (OBU) in a vehicle is an important capability for CVO. However, large location errors from global positioning system (GPS) receivers may occur in cities that shield GPS signals. Therefore, a highly efficient mobile positioning method is proposed based on the collection and analysis of the cellular network signals of CVO data. Paralleland cloud-computing techniques are designed into the proposed method to quickly determine the location of an OBU for CVO. Furthermore, this study proposes analytical models to analyze the availability of the proposed mobile positioning method with various outlier filtering criteria. Experimentally, a CVO system was designed and implemented to collect CVO data from Chunghwa Telecom vehicles and to analyze the cellular network signals of CVO data for location determination. A case study found that the average errors of location determination using the proposed method vs. using the traditional cell-ID-based location method were 163.7 m and 521.2 m, respectively. Furthermore, the practical results show that the average location error and availability of using the proposed method are better than using GPS or the cell-ID-based location method for each road type, particularly urban roads. Therefore, this approach is feasible to determine OBU locations for improving CVO.