Universitätssiegel
Funding
Mobility data marketplace (MDM) Germany
 

Research Project: Derivation of an OSM graph with TMC LCL information to provide real time traffic services

Derivation of an OSM graph with TMC LCL information

Increasing traffic, especially in urban areas, leads to more and more infrastructural bottlenecks and congestion inside transportation networks. The aim is therefore to use existing transport networks as efficiently as possible. Current traffic and incident reports from the Traffic Message Channel (TMC) are an important source of information to provide further services in the context of a dynamic routing.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia currently intends to organize the traffic information of the country and re-presenting it to the road users in a new manner. The Road Construction Department of NRW has realized this development of an integrated transport information portal (Traffic NRW) for North Rhine-Westphalia. In the portal address lookup, a route planner and basic maps are provided. In order to also integrate current traffic information in the portal, a road graph with TMC LCL information based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) is needed. To enable this service BAST agreed (German federal road agency) to publish the Location Code List (LCL) for Germany into the OSM project. The part of the initialized MDM funded project "Development of an OSM road graph with TMC LCL information" was therefore now  to develop a matching method to associate TMC / LCL information automatically with OSM.

Automated matching between LCL and OSM

For matching the LCL information with the OSM road network, a multi-stage process comprising the following steps has been implemented:

  1. Creating a graph LCL (topologies and attributes) from the Location Code List
  2. Transfer of the selected LCL Points and Coordinates using OpenRouteService routing algorithm
  3. Calculation of the route between two points LCL (depending on the segment and the direction)
  4. Semantic validation between LCL segment and the calculated route (OSM Ways)
  5. Matching of segement-based LCL attribute information to the extracted OSM Ways

The figure below shows the implemented system architecture of the presented matching method. As part of the implementation of the matching process, a prototype web-client test has been developed which is used to visualize all the results.

Services

Although LCL information is partially already available in the OSM datasetthere are no further services / applications that illustrate the benefits of localization of traffic information and could imply and activation of the community. The Web client therefor also includes two further layers which uses the currently generated TMC OSM graph to visualize real-time TMC messages. This first initial service provides real-time traffic information for Germany ready, which is then also realized in the future in a similar form in Verkehr.NRW portal.