Route Analytics
Learn about filtering, gap filing, and variants.
The Route Analysis algorithm only considers the roads taken upon exit of the Origin and entry to the Destination.
Route Analytics does not consider routes with overlapping zones, since vehicles can potentially enter the Destination before leaving the Origin.
Filtering
For a route to be presented, 90% of it must pass Geotab’s privacy filters. Due to privacy filtering, it is likely that the number of journeys returned in a Route Analysis will be lower than what is returned in the Origin and Destination analysis. To ensure data quality for a route to be returned, at least 10 journeys must have been observed on that route.
Gap filling
Journeys that may contain very large gaps due to GPS issues are not an accurate representation of the route, and these journeys are dropped. For routes that have smaller gaps (less than 10km), an algorithm is employed to fill in any missing areas along the route.
Variants
For each Origin and Destination(O/D) pair analyzed through Route Analytics, there may be one or many routes returned, depending on the O/D pair and the input, Route Grouping Threshold. The Route Grouping Threshold refers to the percentage of two routes that needs to be the same for them to be grouped together as a single route; this is done for the similar routes to be counted as a single representative route. To account for the possibility of multiple flows being counted as a single route, variant attributes are used to capture the variations on the main route for all included routes. The most common variant forms the basis of the main route returned, and all the other variants are returned as an array against the main route.
For example: An O/D pair analysis is executed with an 80% route grouping threshold. The O/D pair has three journeys with each covering 90% the same route, except for a small stretch of road where two journeys take one deviation, and the third journey takes another. The first deviation will be called Route 1, and the second deviation will be called Route 2. The main route will be the traffic flow from the edge of the Origin zone to the edge of the Destination, followed by the majority of journeys (Route 1). The stretch where there is variability from the remaining journey(s) (Route 2) is captured as a variant of Route 1.
If a user would not like any grouping (setting a route grouping threshold of 1.0), there will still be grouping done to complete any necessary gap filling. If a user does want to group similar trips, their route grouping threshold will only be used if it is lower than the gap filling threshold to ensure accurate gap filling. Once grouped, we will try to fill in any gaps with paths that exist from another route in the group.