Patent ID: 7355528
Filing Date: 2008-04-08
Classification: G01C,G08G

Abstract:
1. A traffic information providing system for creating traffic information to be used in a car navigation system, comprising: traffic information acquiring means externally acquiring traffic information including information relating to a travel time of each of links making up a road on a map; storage means for storing the traffic information acquired by the traffic information acquiring means; statistical means statistically processing past traffic information stored by the storage means; and complementing means calculating traffic information relating to a travel time for a non-provision link to which information about a travel time is not provided by the traffic information acquiring means, through estimate/complement operation on the basis of the statistical processing of the statistical means and traffic information about links in the vicinity of the non-provision link, wherein the traffic information acquired by the traffic information acquiring means includes a congestion degree at each collection time point of the traffic information and information about a length of a section showing the congestion degree; the complementing means has a complementing function of calculating a travel time for the non-provision link with use of the congestion degree of the non-provision link, the length of the section indicative of the congestion degree, and a travel speed corresponding to each predetermined congestion degree; and the complementing function, when an unknown-congestion-degree section is-included in the non-provision link, has at least one of a function of treating the unknown-congestion-degree section as a normal congestion degree section, a function of treating the unknown-congestion-degree section as a section having the same congestion degree as a section having a known congestion degree in the non-provision link, and a function of treating the unknown-congestion-degree section as a section having the same congestion degree as the section having the known congestion degree having a length of each congestion degree obtained by multiplying a ratio of the known-congestion-degree section for each congestion degree by a length of the unknown-congestion-degree section.