APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE ROAD ROUTE OF A VEHICLE BASED ON DATA INDICATING ITS GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION

An apparatus for determining the road route of a vehicle is described. The apparatus receives from a vehicle's on-board device data indicative of a sequence of vehicle geographical positions. From this sequence, the apparatus selects a set of reference points at which significant events relating to the travel occurred, such as stopping, restarting and turnings. For each pair of consecutive reference points, the admissible road route section(s) are determined according to the topology of the road network. Possible road routes between first and last reference points are then determined by concatenating admissible road route sections. Finally, the most probable road route is identified amongst the possible road routes, based on values of a parameter indicating the probability that the vehicle actually followed a possible road route. Each value of this parameter is obtained by comparing the original sequence of geographical positions with one of the possible road routes.