Remote road traffic data collection and intelligent vehicle highway system

A remote traffic data collection and intelligent vehicle highway system for a highway vehicle, comprising:

• a traffic service center adapted to receive and process vehicle position data to determine an average travel time or travel speed for any specific link during a given forecast interval on a given day of a week, and broadcast a digitized road network consisting of nodes interconnected by straight links representing road segments, the links indicating traffic direction between the nodes, and to concurrently, or independently broadcast a forecast of an average travel time or travel speed for the specific link during the given forecast interval on the given day in the future;
• a remote traffic data collection sub-system including in-vehicle devices in a plurality of vehicles, each of the devices being adapted to receive, from time to time, global positioning information from a Global Positioning System (GPS) and to convert the global positioning information into the vehicle position data associated with at least some of the nodes on the digitized road network, the global positioning information being received and converted into the vehicle position data at a predetermined collection interval (CI);
• and
• a communication sub-system in each device and the traffic service center for communicating the vehicle position data from the vehicle to the traffic service center, and the digitized road network and the road traffic forecast from the traffic service center to the vehicle, the vehicle position data being reported to the traffic service center at a predetermined reporting interval (RI), wherein RI>CI.

A method for locating positions of an equipped vehicle travelling roads represented by a digitized road network using geographical positions dynamically collected by the equipped vehicle, comprising:

• retrieving a digitized road network from a traffic service center, the digitized road network being organized in road segments, wherein each road segment is a link represented by a straight line that extends from a source node to an adjacent sink node, the line indicating a traffic direction supported by the link, each one-way road in the digitized road network being represented by a continuous series of links, and each two-way road in the digitized road network being represented by a continuous series of pairs of oppositely indicated, parallel links, each pair connecting two adjacent nodes;
• locating one of the geographical positions of the vehicle on the digitized road network;
• and
• if the geographical position of the vehicle is not coincident with a link, moving the geographical position of the vehicle to a nearest link associated with a node which the vehicle last passed, while maintaining a same distance between the moved geographical position and the last node which the vehicle last passed as a distance between the geographical position and that node before the geographical position was moved.