Pheromone Model: Application to Traffic Congestion Prediction

The ongoing increase in urban populations has intensified the persistent issue of traffic congestion, negatively impacting the quality of life by increasing commute times, compromising road safety, and deteriorating local air quality. As a result, identifying and forecasting traffic congestion patterns has become critical, positioning Traffic Congestion Prediction (TCP) as a rapidly growing field of study. Recent advancements in Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) sensor technologies have further underscored the importance of TCP in the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).This review paper explores advanced TCP methodologies, with a particular emphasis on innovative forecasting techniques and technologies vital to the ITS domain. We provide a comprehensive overview of statistical and machine learning approaches, including hybrid and ensemble models, that are commonly used for TCP. Additionally, the paper discusses various forecasting techniques and elaborates on performance evaluation metrics from both regression and classification perspectives.To provide a practical framework, a standardized step-bystep methodology often adopted in TCP problems is presented. As part of the implementation, a KNearest Neighbors (KNN) classifier was employed as the proposed predictive model. Comparative evaluation revealed that KNN outperformed the Logistic Regression model in terms of both accuracy and robustness in predicting traffic congestion events. The results validate the potential of data-driven approaches to enhance proactive traffic management and informed decision-making in the context of smart cities

Traffic congestion prediction plays a guiding role in vehicle route selection. Through traffic congestion prediction, it can not only help to reduce urban traffic pressure, but also facilitate vehicle travel and save vehicle travel costs.[1]Aiming at the problem of poor accuracy of estimated traffic congestion time caused by inaccurate estimation of vehicle speed in case of serious traffic congestion, people extracted the key factors of urban traffic congestion such as average travel speed, morning and evening peaks, average travel time, average delay time, average waiting time, and number of weeks. People constructed a multi-linear regression prediction model based on R language and used the selected ones and used the selected five administrative districts of New York City (mainly on the main roads of cities and highways), the data of road traffic conditions are monitored every five minutes for calculation and validity verification.

<p style="text-align: justify;">Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a key element in enhancing transportation systems, enabling automation, optimization, and real-time traffic flow prediction. Its application in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) contributes to more efficient passenger transport in urban areas, where infrastructure fails to keep up with growing demand, leading to frequent traffic congestion and bottlenecks.This paper will describe how advanced AI algorithms and deep learning models enable traffic analysis, congestion prediction, and route optimization, improving the reliability and efficiency of public transportation. The integration of AI into ITS not only optimizes traffic flows but also enhances sustainability by reducing emissions and improving energy performance. Data-driven smart solutions make transportation safer, more environmentally friendly, and better suited to user needs.</p>

Traffic congestion has a negative impact on our daily life. Predicting the trend of traffic congestion can provide a valuable guideline to address such problems. Most existing approaches focus on the tasks of predicting traffic volume or traffic speed, which do not effectively address the challenges of traffic congestion prediction. First, traffic congestion exhibits daily and weekly temporal patterns, but these patterns are not strictly the same, which indicates complicated long-term periodicity. Second, traffic congestion sparsely distributes over different periods of time, which leads to complex short-term and mid-term temporal dependencies. Third, since traffic congestion will propagate to adjacent road segments over time, it exhibits complex spatio-temporal correlations. To address them, we propose a periodic shift and event-aware spatio-temporal graph convolutional network for traffic congestion prediction. Specifically, we propose to capture the differences and similarities of long-term periodic temporal patterns to handle the complicated long-term periodicity. To effectively capture short-term and mid-term temporal dependencies, we regard a continuous time sequence of the congested condition as a traffic congestion event, and then adopt the widely-used long short-term memory model to learn the sequential dependencies of traffic congestion events. Finally, we integrate the graph convolutional network into the modeling of temporal dependencies to capture the complex spatio-temporal correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model. In addition, we deploy our model in production at Amap, and it achieves great performance improvement in terms of the F1-score compared to the production baseline. This confirms that our model is a practical solution for real-world congestion prediction services.

With a large number of traffic parameters data, it is an important issue that how to set up an efficient model of classification and prediction to identify the congestion state as soon as possible. The article provided a model of predicting traffic congestion based on the learn vector quantization neural network by making use of traffic parameters such as speed, volume and occupancy which were detected by vehicle detectors. The model can finally classify the traffic congestion situation and normal situation by training the LVQ neural network in the software Matlab. The model can predict the road traffic situation by inputting the traffic flow data, thus providing exact road information for the dispersion of traffic congestion. Finally, an example was given to train and test the network. And the training result demonstrated the algorithm was feasible to the prediction of traffic congestion and can be actually useful in reality.

Highway congestion has become a normal social problem that needs to be managed more accurately and deeply. In this paper, a traffic flow congestion prediction model is established based on LSTM, and the traffic parameters obtained from four observation points of China's long and deep high-speed video are used for training, so as to provide real-time early warning before the continuous congestion of the road section between the third and fourth points. The results show that the model constructed in this paper can reach 89.25% accuracy after predicting 400 times steps in 50 times Windows. After further evaluation of the constructed traffic flow congestion prediction model, it is found that the mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and R2 is 0.0897, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$0.2334,0.6028$</tex>, respectively, revealing that the model can well predict the future traffic congestion.

Road traffic has long been recognized to represent a country’s prosperity. Unfortunately, traffic congestion coming with it is considered as one of the most significant challenge in modern cities. Thus, a promising paradigm, namely, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has become a research focus which lies on its feasibility and efficiency of solving transportation issues. In the open literature, researchers have proposed theories and developed corresponding models to alleviate traffic congestion. However, many solutions are static, which means they serve to analyze and evaluate the traffic systems rather than schedule the road traffic dynamically. To this end, this paper develops a road traffic congestion prediction model to forecast the congestion level. The congestion performance metrics are obtained by developing a queueing system subject to self-similar traffic. This is because Hurst parameter evaluation, subject to road traffic flow at rush hour, presents strong self-similar characteristic. The developed model is validated by comparing results derived from model with that of simulations on real road traffic data provided by government authorities.

The increase in vehicle ownership and urban population puts a strain on roads and increases traffic congestion within developed and developing nations. Congestion affects an individual’s time and increases an individual’s fuel consumption and pollution output, undercutting efforts towards smart/ sustainable cities. Outdated statistical congestion predicting methods do not account for the non-linear, dynamic nature of congestion with regards to external factors such as, weather, road incidents, and infrastructure. The adoption of machine and deep learning develops the framework towards adaptable and data-driven congestion predicting methods. This study develops a framework that combines the fundamentals of machine learning algorithms, Queuing Theory, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Deep Belief Networks (DBN) for robust and interprefig traffic congestion forecasting. The traffic flow micro-dynamics integration with Queuing Theory and the use of historical/ real-time multimodal data such as sensor feeds, GPS trajectories, and incident reports as a basis for forecasting helps in robust congestion prediction. Polynomials of moving and rest queues with defined traffic characteristics fuel flow mechanisms. The designed framework uses the DBN and Queuing Theory for robust traffic forecasting.

In developing countries, traffic in a road network is a major issue. In this paper we investigate the tradeoff between speed versus accuracy of predicting the severity of road traffic congestion. The timely prediction of traffic congestion using semantic web technologies that will be helpful in various applications like better road guidance, vehicle navigation system. In the proposed work, ontology is created based on sensor and video data. By using rule inference of ontology on parallel processing of sensor and video data, our system gives the timely prediction of traffic congestion.

The dismal performance of the traditional traffic congestion measures and motorist attitudes on Nigeria roads have not only made traffic flow unpredictable and worsening but also worrisome and defiling every measures put-in-place by the Government. To solve these problems, the study assessed traffic congestion and Intelligent Transport System (ITS) in Ibadan, Nigeria. In achieving this, the study examined among others, factors aiding traffic congestion; effectiveness of the existing traffic congestion measures; and the performance and disposition to the use of ITS in the study area. Systematic random sampling was used to administer 386 copies of a questionnaire on commercial motorists, while data collected were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential (Pearson Chi-Square and Fisher's Exact Tests) statistics. Findings revealed that faulty intersections (3.586) and excesses of traffic officers (3.558) were worsening factors aiding traffic congestion in Ibadan city. Meanwhile, electronic traffic signalization (3.558) and law enforcement and regulation (3.499) were rated the most effective existing traffic congestion measures. In other words, real-time traffic signal devices (3.609); automated travel advisory system (3.595) and road congestion pricing devices (3.581) were highly rated and favourably disposed to use ITS. However, the Chi-Square Tests shows that the use Intelligent Transport System is statistically influenced by users' level of education (Sig. value &lt; 0.05). The study concludes that there is a total necessity and willingness to use ITS in the study area. Hence, the study recommends exigent and holistic approach in the provision and enforcement of ITS towards mitigating congestion and other suggestions for improved traffic flow in Nigerian cities including Ibadan.

Traffic congestion prediction is the premise to solve the problem of traffic congestion. Aiming at the problem that traffic volume was rarely considered in traffic congestion prediction based on spatio-temporal characteristics, this paper added two features of bus flow and time occupancy on the basis of temporal correlation and spatial correlation analysis of speed based on floating bus data. A BP neural network speed prediction model optimized by whale optimization algorithm (WOA) considering the temporal and spatial characteristics of bus flow was proposed, and the traffic state was divided into three levels by fuzzy theory. The results show that the speed prediction method based on temporal and spatial characteristics and bus flow characteristics proposed in this paper has good performance. Compared with the traditional BP neural network prediction results, the root mean square error and mean absolute error of WOA-BP neural network prediction model are reduced by 11.7% and 11.2% respectively, and the determination coefficient reaches 93.7%. The prediction accuracy of traffic congestion based on fuzzy theory is 90.06%, and the prediction accuracy of the model is higher.

Traffic prediction is a critical element of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enhancing road safety, traffic flow, and environmental sustainability. By leveraging big data and machine learning, ITS optimizes fuel consumption, route planning, and traffic signal control. This study evaluates the performance of four machine learning models—K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, and Random Forest—for classifying traffic conditions based on 11 months of vehicle count data collected every 15 minutes. The traffic levels are categorized into four classes: Heavy Traffic, Medium Traffic, No Traffic, and Traffic Jam. Among the models, Random Forest achieved the highest overall accuracy (99%) and delivered strong precision and recall across all traffic levels, especially in distinguishing between complex traffic patterns. KNN also showed high accuracy but required more computational resources. Decision Tree performed comparably, particularly for Heavy Traffic, while Naïve Bayes struggled with lower precision and recall due to its limitations in handling complex data distributions. The results underscore the robustness of Random Forest for real-time traffic condition classification and support its integration into ITS for effective, data-driven traffic and congestion management in urban environments.

The traffic congestion often occurs in urban road network. When one of the sections becomes congested, it will lead to a series of congestions in other sections. The traffic congestion spreads rapidly until part of road network becomes congestion ultimately. In this case, the paper investigates the mechanism of the traffic congestion in urban road network and points out that subsystems of the traffic congestion always perform completive and cooperative functions in the process of traffic congestion. The process behaves in a manner of self-organized criticality, which can be forecasted. The paper also establishes synergetic predictive models based on self-organized criticality of the synergetic theory. Finally, the paper takes Beijing road network as an example to forecast the widespread traffic congestion. The result shows that the established models are accuracy, and the traffic congestion is featured of self-organized criticality.

Half of the world’s population resides in cities and this percentage is going to rise in the coming years. This rapid transformation of the economy and society is making traditional city management redundant. Intensive urbanization has brought with it some challenges. Scanty resources, population growth, increased carbon footprint, reduced air quality, congestion on roads, depriving health status, and falling food quality, all are prominent parts of cities. Does this bring a question in mind is accelerated growth sustainable? The answer and solution to this is an adaption of the Smart City Concept. A smart city integrates all the available technology with the requirements of city development and builds infrastructure which can improve the quality of life of citizens. Smart cities are designed in a manner to use minimum resources with maximum efficiency in all areas of urban life. It provides smart solutions using smart technologies. Urban needs and technological advancements meet in smart cities. It manages cities more quickly and effectively by using AI, IT technologies, and robotic process automation. Intelligent transportation, intelligent energy, intelligent governance, intelligent security, intelligent healthcare are all central to the idea of smart cities. The emphasis of this essay is on smart transit as a component of smart cities. The movement of people and goods across several geographical boundaries has been significantly aided by the transportation sector. Globally, the majority of smart cities face logistical and transportation issues. Both the fast growing human population and the increase in the number of cars on the road are to blame for this. In order to design and run a sustainable transportation system, technology may be of great assistance. Robotic systems for real-time vehicle data collection, traffic management, and using mobility on demand in trip planning through a single user interface have emerged as cities struggle with traffic congestion. The transportation industry, which faces difficulties including traffic congestion, unanticipated delays, and routing issues that cause businesses to lose money, has successfully used robotic process automation. Robotic process automation provides reliable results and affordable solutions while reducing uncertainty in the decision-making process. It is very helpful in designing and running a successful transit system. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems for obtaining real-time data from vehicles, buses, and trucks for traffic management and using mobility on demand in trip planning through a single user interface have emerged as cities struggle with poor management and congestion. By examining different uses of robotic process automation, it is possible to evaluate precise prediction and detection models that are intended to forecast traffic volume, an appropriate route, traffic conditions, accurate information about timing, incidents, and which time and roadway for transport are suitable for running and mobility. The application of RPA in smart cities could be seen in Intelligent Transportation Systems’ Traffic Management, Public Transportation, Safety Management, Manufacturing, and Logistics. The research focuses on areas of concern for smart cities in the sphere of the transportation sector and related difficulties that may be solved via robotic process automation. The article emphasizes the challenges and solutions for making smart transportation more effective by using Intelligent Robotic Transportation Systems.

Methods of treatment (case reports)