• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.14-28
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• 2015

Numerous research has been conducted using internet search data since the mid-2000s. For example, Google Inc. developed a service predicting influenza patterns using the internet search data. The main objective of this study is to prove the hypothesis that highway traffic indices are similar to the internet search patterns. In order to achieve this objective, a model to predict the number of vehicles entering the expressway and space-mean speed was developed and the goodness-of-fit of the model was assessed. The results revealed several findings. First, it was shown that the Google search traffic was a good predictor for the TCS entering traffic volume model at sites with frequent commute trips, and it had a negative correlation with the TCS entering traffic volume. Second, the Naver search traffic was utilized for the TCS entering traffic volume model at sites with numerous recreational trips, and it was positively correlated with the TCS entering traffic volume. Third, it was uncovered that the VDS speed had a negative relationship with the search traffic on the time series diagram. Lastly, it was concluded that the transfer function noise time series model showed the better goodness-of-fit compared to the other time series model. It is expected that "Big Data" from the internet search data can be extensively applied in the transportation field if the sources of search traffic, time difference and aggregation units are explored in the follow-up studies.