@article{ref1,
title="On the new era of urban traffic monitoring with massive drone data: the pNEUMA large-scale field experiment",
journal="Transportation research part C: emerging technologies",
year="2020",
author="Barmpounakis, Emmanouil and Geroliminis, Nikolas",
volume="111",
number="",
pages="50-71",
abstract="The new era of sharing information and &quot;big data&quot; has raised our expectations to make mobility more predictable and controllable through a better utilization of data and existing resources. The realization of these opportunities requires going beyond the existing traditional ways of collecting traffic data that are based either on fixed-location sensors or GPS devices with low spatial coverage or penetration rates and significant measurement errors, especially in congested urban areas. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or simply &quot;drones&quot; have been proposed as a pioneering tool of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) infrastructure due to their unique characteristics, but various challenges have kept these efforts only at a small size. This paper describes the system architecture and preliminary results of a first-of-its-kind experiment, nicknamed pNEUMA, to create the most complete urban dataset to study congestion. A swarm of 10 drones hovering over the central business district of Athens over multiple days to record traffic streams in a congested area of a 1.3 km2 area with more than 100 km-lanes of road network, around 100 busy intersections (signalized or not), many bus stops and close to half a million trajectories. The aim of the experiment is to record traffic streams in a multi-modal congested environment over an urban setting using UAS that can allow the deep investigation of critical traffic phenomena. The pNEUMA experiment develops a prototype system that offers immense opportunities for researchers many of which are beyond the interests and expertise of the authors. This open science initiative creates a unique observatory of traffic congestion, a scale an-order-of-magnitude higher than what was available till now, that researchers from different disciplines around the globe can use to develop and test their own models.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0968-090X",
doi="10.1016/j.trc.2019.11.023",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2019.11.023"
}