Floating Car Data in Transportation: A Survey of the Literature

Abstract

Floating Car Data (FCD) are increasingly used to analyse mobility patterns and support transport-system management, but the evidence remains fragmented across heterogeneous applications, sensing technologies, and data-processing methods, particularly regarding road-infrastructure monitoring. This study presents a systematic literature review and structured evidence map of FCD research published between 2010 and 2025. Following PRISMA methodology, Scopus and Google Scholar were searched using the exact expression “floating car data”. The search retrieved 2127 records; after bibliographic harmonisation, duplicate removal, title-and-abstract screening, full-text retrieval, and eligibility assessment, 165 publications were included. The studies were classified through a top-down framework covering application domain, sensing technology, processing approach, validation method, geographical region, deployment scale, and integration with Pavement Management Systems (PMSs). Traffic-state estimation and mobility-planning applications covered 100 publications (60.6%), whereas infrastructure monitoring was the primary domain in 20 studies (12.1%). GPS or GNSS data were used in 128 publications (77.6%), while accelerometers, gyroscopes, or inertial measurement units were reported in 29 studies (17.6%). Only 15 publications (9.1%) described operational or real-time deployment, and explicit PMS-oriented integration was identified in only 9 studies (5.5%). The findings show that FCD research is methodologically mature for traffic and mobility applications but remains comparatively fragmented for pavement-condition assessment. The review therefore proposes an operational pathway linking accelerometric data acquisition, preprocessing, normalization, fleet-level aggregation, validation, data fusion, and PMS decision-making. These results highlight that the principal research gap concerns not sensor availability, but the development of standardized, transferable, and operationally validated frameworks for network-wide pavement monitoring.