Recognizing and Analyzing Private Car Commuters Using Big Data of Electronic Registration Identification of Vehicles

Private cars’ travel has been one of the main factors causing urban traffic congestion. Especially during morning and evening rush hours, private car commuters bring a significant burden to traffic. However, there is very little literature on them due to the lack of access to relevant data. A real-world dataset containing vehicle passing records of Electronic Registration Identification (ERI) of vehicles provides us with an opportunity to research private car commuters. We propose a regular behavior-based model to recognize private car commuters. In the model, a regular behavior-based definition of private car commuters is firstly proposed. Then, TDSP(Time dependent shortest path)-based distance measurement and a hierarchical clustering method are designed to extract regular behaviors. Furthermore, we utilize a regular threshold $p $ to help determine regular behaviors. The experiment, which is conducted on a real-world dataset containing one-week vehicle passing records in Chongqing of China, validates the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed model. Moreover, we analyze the mobility pattern of private car commuters, and some typical mobility patterns of them are successfully found.