trajectanalyse

Trajectanalyse, or trajectory analysis, is the study of the paths followed by moving objects over time. It combines spatiotemporal data collection with methods to represent and analyze trajectories to extract movement patterns, behaviors, and dynamics. It is used across disciplines to understand where objects travel, how fast, and how routes change under varying conditions.

Data and representation: Trajectory data come from GPS traces, sensor networks, mobile devices, video tracking, or simulation outputs. Trajectories are often represented as sequences of timestamped positions, or as piecewise continuous paths with derived attributes such as speed, direction, and acceleration; preprocessing steps include noise reduction, map-matching, and coordinate normalization.

Methods: Analyses range from descriptive statistics (distance, duration) to clustering of trajectories by similarity, segment-based analysis, pattern mining, route choice modeling, origin-destination estimation, and forecasting. In some fields, trajectory inference or pseudotime analysis reconstructs progression along a process from snapshots.

Applications: Urban and transport planning (traffic flow, hotspot detection), logistics and ride-hailing optimization, sports analytics (player movement patterns), wildlife ecology (migration), criminology (movement patterns of suspects), epidemiology (spread by travel), aerospace and robotics (path planning and anomaly detection).

Challenges: Data quality and privacy concerns, scale and computational complexity, map matching accuracy, irregular sampling, heterogeneity of sources, and interpretability of complex trajectories. Tools include GIS platforms and specialized libraries that support trajectory storage, querying, and analysis.