A Comparative Analysis of Probe Data Sources for Provision of Work Zone Congestion Information to the Public

With the rise in highway maintenance demands, work zones have proliferated across the United States, posing traffic and safety challenges. Dissemination of work zone information to the public is essential to improve traffic flow and efficiency in work zones. Central to the success of smart work zones (SWZ) public information is real-time data availability. This study compares two alternative probe data types to ground truth data from field sensors. The two emerging probe vehicle datasets tested in this study are connected vehicle (CV) data supplied by a third-party data vendor and segment average speeds (for each minute) obtained from a different vendor. The mean and minimum speeds of the probe data types were analyzed using frequency distributions and descriptive statistics. The CV data displayed a high amount of variability in minimum and mean speeds in both travel directions compared to segment average speeds, making them more similar to the ground truth data. This finding is useful in providing precise real-time information to the driving public and will improve the accuracy with which work zone information is relayed.