Neuhold Robert, Gursch Heimo, Cik Michael
2018
Data collection on motorways for traffic management operations is traditionally based on local measurements points and camera monitoring systems. This work looks into social media as additional data source for the Austrian motorway operator ASFINAG. A data driven system called Driver´s Dashboard was developed to collect incident descriptions from social media sources (Facebook, RSS feeds), to filter relevant messages, and to fuse them with local traffic data. All collected texts were analysed for concepts describing road situations linking the texts from the web and social media with traffic messages and traffic data. Due to the Austrian characteristics in social media use and road transportation very few messages are available compared to other studies. 3,586 messages were collected within a five-week period. 7.1% of these messages were automatically annotated as traffic relevant by the system. An evaluation of these traffic relevant messages showed that 22% of these messages were actually relevant for the motorway operator. Further, the traffic relevant messages for the motorway operator were analysed more in detail to identify correlations between message text and traffic data characteristics. A correlation of message text and traffic data was found in nine of eleven messages by comparing the speed profiles and traffic state data with the message text.