HTTP: A new framework for bus travel time prediction based on historical trajectories

In this paper, we develop a new bus travel time prediction framework, called Historical Trajectory based Travel/Arrival Time Prediction (HTTP) for real-time prediction of travel time over future segments (and thus the arrival time at stops) of an on-going bus journey. The basic idea behind HTTP is to use a collection of historical trajectories "similar" to the current bus trajectory to predict the future segments. Specifically, the HTTP framework (1) samples a set of similar trajectories as the basis for travel time estimation instead of relying on only one historical trajectory best matching the on-going bus journey; and (2) explores different prediction schemes, namely, passed segments, temporal features, and hybrid methods, to identify the sample set of similar trajectories. We conduct a comprehensive empirical experimentation using real bus trajectory data collected from Taipei City, Taiwan to validate our ideas and to evaluate the proposed schemes. Experimental result shows that the proposed prediction schemes significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and baseline techniques.