QUATRA deals with the creation of tools for quality management for traffic data on freeways and in urban road environments. It has two major objectives:

The first objective is to develop procedures and software tools to measure and estimate the quality of incoming online traffic data in a freeway control centre. The incoming data, usually in a minute-to-minute interval is used for freeway control, management and information. For different control or information purposes it is often very important to know, if the underlying traffic data is correct or erroneous. In that case the type of error needs to be identified.

The second objective is to develop a comparable service for the evaluation of urban traffic data for cities and their transport authorities. This service has access to the cities’ traffic data database and calculates offline the performance measures and quality indicators on a daily basis. The results are then reported, e.g. via email, to the transport authority. The big challenge is to find and identify quality indicators for urban detectors as well as errors that corrupt the daily traffic control.

The quality management for freeways will increase the reliability of automated and manual traffic control under freeway conditions (for example guidance and speed harmonization) or the generated traffic messages which are also partly based on detector data. On urban roads it will improve for example the signal coordination mainly during peak times and will also help to reduce travel times and emissions.

The software will be developed in order to be used for a variety of different existing data collection systems and data formats. Test data of the ASFINAG (Austrian Freeway Authority) and the City of Munich will be analyzed.