Exploratory visualisation of congestion evolutions on urban transport networks

Visualisation is an effective tool for studying traffic congestion using massive traffic datasets collected from traffic sensors. Existing techniques can reveal where/when congested areas are formed, developed, and moved on one or several highway roads, but it is still challenging to visualise the evolution of traffic congestion on the whole road network, especially on dense urban networks. To address this challenge, this paper proposes three 3D exploratory visualisation techniques: the isosurface, the constrained isosurface, and the wall map. These three techniques have different advantages and should be combined to leverage their respective strong points. We present our visualisation techniques with the case of link travel time data from Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) in London.