Pedestrian facility usage monitoring using multiple sources of data

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the possibility of developing facility usage monitoring system using multiple sources of information. The system is able to provide fundamental information for analyzing pedestrian usage behavior including pedestrian flows, speeds, and densities. In particular, MAC address data are considered as complementary data sources which could passively obtain pedestrian walking time from individuals. A number of data processing steps are introduced to tackle the particular challenges of pedestrian travel time estimation using MAC address data. The system performance is evaluated using a case study on The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Practicality of the system is evaluated in terms of estimation accuracy and the penetration rate of MAC address data. The results show that pedestrian travel time can be estimated from the passive MAC address data with acceptable accuracy.