For each hour, we can distinguish between observed traffic data, typical traffic data, and relative traffic data.
The observed traffic is the total traffic observed by the individual Telraam on the network for a given hour. This observed data is reported under the label 'Data'. For example, the total number of cars that passed last Friday betweem 2:00 pm and 3:00 pm is 1100. These number of 1100 cars are an example of the observed traffic data.
Typical traffic data is essentially the average of the observed traffic data over the past year (or if some Telraam units have been active for less than a year, then over their entire lifetime) in the network during the same hour and day of the week. The typical traffic data is used in the ranking process. In our fictitious example, the typical traffic would be the average of the total observed traffic of the last 52 Fridays between 2:00 pm and 3:00 pm local time, e.g., 1000 cars.
We can also express the observed traffic as a percentage of this typical traffic, and this percentage is given as the relative traffic for the network. So if the observed traffic in our example hour was 1100 cars, and the typical traffic was 1000 cars, then we can say that the relative traffic was 110%, because we counted 10% more cars than what we would expect based on last year's observations for this hour on this day of the week.
Because even well-designed networks are not always guaranteed to have the same set of cameras active (e.g., new cameras may be added over time, some cameras may become temporarily inactive or be moved to other segments, etc.), we ensure that when calculating typical and relative traffic data for a given hour, we use only the observed and historical data from those segments of the network that actually had active counts during the hour in question.
