Collecting Floating Car Data with Smartphones: Results from a Field Trial in Austria.

Abstract: This work reports on results from a field trial regarding the collection of floating car data with smartphones in Austria. The field trial has been conducted within Austria’s National Floating Car Data Testbed pursuing the goal to test different aspects of floating car data technology for traffic data collection, traffic state estimation and traffic prediction. The test bed collects, processes and analyses FCD from several thousand vehicles. The field trial for smartphone-based data collection has been conducted within the Federal State of Salzburg covering 1500 kilometres of major road network. Between the launch of the Android-based smartphone application in March 2014 and the end of the field trial in February 2015, the application has been downloaded by more than 2100 users. One year after launch the app is still installed on 650 devices and attracts around 15 users daily. The work gives insights into the application’s concepts and discusses app usage statistics, usage patterns and user feedback in the context of community-driven traffic data collection. On the one hand, results from the field trial confirm that community-driven traffic data collection is still not a phenomenon of the masses due to various challenges discussed throughout the work. On the other hand, results contribute to a deeper understanding of community-driven data collection in the traffic domain and help to learn for future trials.