Visual Analysis of Urban Traffic Data based on High-Resolution and High-Dimensional Environmental Sensor Data

Abstract

Urbanization is an increasing global trend resulting in a strong increase in public and individual transportation needs. Accordingly, a major challenge for traffic and urban planners is the design of sustainable mobility concepts to maintain and increase the long-term health of humans by reducing environmental pollution. Recent developments in sensor technology allow the precise tracking of vehicle sensor information, allowing a closer and more in-depth analysis of traffic data. We propose a visual analytics system for the exploration of environmental factors in these high-resolution and high-dimensional mobility sensor data. Additionally, we introduce an interactive visual logging approach to enable experts to cope with complex interactive analysis processes and the problem of the reproducibility of results. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated via two expert studies with two domain experts from the field of environment-related projects and urban traffic planning.