Transportation data visualization with a focus on freight: a literature review

ABSTRACT

Road-based freight movements are a critical component of the supply chain and transportation networks. With the drive to invest in big data collection capabilities, most of the collected freight movement data remain underutilized. To improve the efficiency and resiliency of the supply chain, it is essential to enhance the visibility of goods movements on road networks. To this end, we provide in this paper a comprehensive literature review on this topic and analyze the previous research from different perspectives, such as data levels of abstraction and existing visualization techniques. In addition, we provide a taxonomy of freight transportation visualization according to the underlying analytic objective. Furthermore, we propose a decision support tool to aid freight data analysts in selecting the right visualization tools. Finally, we identify research gaps in the field of freight transportation visualization.

Highlights

• Systematic bibliometric analysis of state of art research related to location-based telematics data visualization

• Applications for location-based telematics data based on different levels of abstraction

• A taxonomy for visualization techniques for location-based telematics data and possible application in freight transportation

• A proposed decision support tool for selecting possible visualization techniques based on the abstraction and availability of data

• Discussion of challenges and future research direction for freight transportation data visualization

KEYWORDS:

• Freight movement
• visualization
• freight data analytics
• location-based telematics data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada: [grant no 395573].