Review of optimal sensor location models for travel time estimation

The problem of optimally locating fixed sensors on a traffic network infrastructure has been object of growing interest in the past few years. Sensor location decisions models differ from each other according to the type of sensors that are to be located and the objective that one would like to optimize. This paper surveys the existing contributions in the literature related to the problem of locating fixed sensors on the network to estimate travel times. The review consists of two parts: the first part reviews the methodological approaches for the optimal location of counting sensors on a freeway for travel time estimation; the second part focuses on the results related to the optimal location of Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) readers on the links of a network to get travel time information.