Utilizing historical and current travel times based on floating car data for management of an express truck fleet

Abstract

During the last nine years, a couple of prototype ITS applications based on Floating Car Data (FCD) of taxi fleets have been developed at German Aerospace Center (DLR). A core application is a route guidance and monitoring system based on current and historical road segment travel times. Recently, it has been extended for use in the German funded project SmartTruck, run by a consortium consisting of the logistics key player DHL, DLR and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). An important aim of the project was the use of historical and current traffic information for energy-efficient, optimized offline planning and dynamic re-planning of the tours of DHL express trucks in Berlin, Germany. This paper discusses the architecture of the SmartTruck system and the methodology used to generate historic and current road segment travel times from positional data.