Congestion Barcodes
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This work presents a new method to quantify connectivity in transportation networks. Inspired by the field of topological data analysis, we propose a novel approach to explore the robustness of road network connectivity in the presence of congestion on the roadway. The robustness of the pattern is summarized in a congestion barcode, which can be constructed directly from traffic datasets commonly used for navigation. As an initial demonstration, we illustrate the main technique on a publicly available traffic dataset in a neighborhood in New York City.

Paper on arXiv

arxiv.org/abs/1707.08557

Original data files

doi.org/10.13012/B2IDB-4900670_V1

This research was conducted as part of the Illinois Geometry Laboratory's 2017 program. It was an offshoot of the much larger Manhattan traffic project.

Below is a short video that visualizes the topology of traffic.