Determining structural route components from GPS traces

Analysis of GPS traces shows that people often do not use the least cost path through the transportation network while making trips. This leads to the question which structural path characteristics can be used to construct realistic route choice sets for use in traffic simulation models. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that, for utilitarian trips, the route between origin and destination consists of a small number of concatenated least cost paths. The hypothesis is verified by analyzing routes extracted from large sets of recorded GPS traces which constitute revealed preference information. Trips have been extracted from the traces and for each trip the path in the transportation network is determined by map matching. This is followed by a path decomposition phase for which the algorithm constitutes the first contribution of this paper. There are multiple ways to split a given path in a directed graph into a minimal number of subpaths of minimal cost.