TrajRank: Exploring travel behaviour on a route by trajectory ranking

In this paper, we propose a novel visual analysis method TrajRank to study the travel behaviour of vehicles along one route. We focus on the spatial-temporal distribution of travel time, i.e., the time spent on each road segment and the travel time variation in rush/non-rush hours. TrajRank first allows users to interactively select a route, and segment it into several road segments. Then trajectories passing this route are automatically extracted. These trajectories are ranked on each road segment according to travel time and further clustered according to the rankings on all road segments. Based on the above ranking analysis, we provide a temporal distribution view showing the temporal distribution of travel time and a ranking diagram view showing the spatial variation of travel time. With real taxi GPS data, we present three use cases and an informal user study to show the effectiveness and usability of our method.