In this paper we report progress on the design of a vehicle tracking algorithm developed by TRL in conjunction with Bristol University. Once implemented, the algorithm will provide a comprehensive data set describing individual vehicle trajectories through a motorway. These trajectories can primarily be used to help calibrate and improve microscopic traffic simulation models. We start by giving a brief overview of current microscopic car-following and lane changing models found in the literature, and describe the various sources of data currently available to calibrate them. We then provide a detailed description of the data source used by the algorithm described in this paper. Finally, we describe how the data can be used to re-identify individual vehicles as they travel through a motorway, and provide some results of early algorithm implementation. (Author/publisher)
Abstract