Microsegmenting: An approach for precise distance calculation for GPS based ITS applications

Onroad distance calculation between two geographical points is an integral part of various Global Positioning System (GPS) based Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. We have found that mere calculating the distance between two geographical points without giving importance to
geographical information of the road, such as curves can lead to under estimation of the distance calculated, cause of which we refer to as the “ Displacement problem ”.
In this paper, we propose the methodology of Microsegmenting to overcome the Displacement Problem. To validate the proposed method and to quantify improvement over the existing technique of distance calculation we conduct experiments using real-world GPS traces from cities: Hyderabad, India and Chicago, USA. The experimental results show a significant improvement in distance estimation over existing technique. The significance of the improvement can be visualized by the fact that, theoretically this improvement in distance calculation can improve the travel time prediction, an important ITS applications, by an average of 22 seconds (approx.) between each pair of traces.