A new technique to find candidate links for map matching for transportation applications

Algorithms for map matching are important for numerous transport applications. Typically, the first step in the development of such algorithms one needs techniques for finding candidate road segments. Most proposals for finding candidate road segments are either computationally very intensive, or not very precise, which puts additional burden on the rest of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new quantity called an Alignment Quotient (AQ) to find road segments in close proximity to a GPS data point. We also propose an algorithm that employs the AQ to find candidate road segments, and we conduct a preliminary analysis for the same.