Traffic Noise Analysis Applied to Automatic Vehicle Counting and Classification

Modelling of traffic noise in the vicinity of urban road intersections

The intelligent transportation system seeks to reduce traffic and improve the driving experience. They give us a lot of data that we can use to improve services for both the public and transportation officials by feeding it into machine learning systems. Most importantly, Traffic environment refers to everything that might have an impact on how much traffic is moving down the road, including traffic signals, accidents, protests, and even road repairs that might result in a backup. A motorist or rider can make an informed choice if they have previous knowledge that is very close to approximate all the above and many more real-world circumstances that can affect traffic. Additionally, it aids in the development of driverless vehicles. Traffic data have been growing dramatically in recent decades, and we are moving toward big data concepts for transportation. The current approaches for predicting traffic flow use some traffic prediction models, however they are still inadequate to handle practical situations. We thus aimed to focus on the traffic flow forecast problem using the traffic data and prediction models. The proposed model called DRGNN, a dilated recurrent graph neural network framework aims to effectively analyze and predict the traffic pattern by considering the spatial (space) and temporal (time) aspects of the real-time traffic data considering social relationships between internet of vehicles which indeed produced accurate and valuable insights that could help in deploying the model in any suitable real-time traffic monitoring and prediction system.

With the increasing complexity of the network, the current network traffic has strong nonlinearity and burstiness. Therefore, the traditional traffic prediction model is no longer applicable. The neural network model, especially the LSTM, can well fit the nonlinearity of time-series data and preserve the information memory of the past. However, as for the periodicity of long-term span network traffic data, the neural network model does not perform well. Based on this, this paper proposes LTS-TP (Long-Term Span Traffic Prediction model), a network traffic prediction model, to solve the problem. First, the model decomposes the collected network traffic data using the improved STL decomposition algorithm to preserve the seasonal component. Then, the trend component and the remainder component are input into the Seq2Seq model based on the LSTM added with the improved attention mechanism for prediction. Finally, the predicted value of the output is added to the seasonal component, and the final network traffic prediction value is obtained. In the simulation part, this paper uses the MAWI public data set to test the proposed network traffic prediction model and compared performance with other models. The results show that the network traffic prediction model proposed in this paper has a good predictive effect on long-term span network traffic data.

A road traffic noise prediction model (ASJ MODEL-1998) has been integrated with a road traffic simulator (AVENUE) to produce the Dynamic areawide Road traffic NoisE simulator-DRONE. This traffic-noise-GIS based integrated tool is upgraded to predict noise levels in built-up areas. The integration of traffic simulation with a noise model provides dynamic access to traffic flow characteristics and hence automated and detailed predictions of traffic noise. The prediction is not only on the spatial scale but also on temporal scale. The linkage with GIS gives a visual representation to noise pollution in the form of dynamic areawide traffic noise contour maps. The application of DRONE on a real world built-up area is also presented.

In order to control noise pollution it is necessary to have a suitable calculation method for traffic noise prediction. Since 1950s many mathematical models for estimation of road traffic noise levels have been developed, and most of the available models are based on regression analysis of experimental data. This paper presents the application of soft computing techniques in traffic noise prediction. Two models for prediction of equivalent A-weighted level of road traffic noise are presented and their predictions are compared to experimental data collected by traffic noise monitoring in the urban environment, as well as to predictions of commonly used traffic noise models. The results obtained by statistical analysis of differences between the measured and the calculated noise levels show that the application of neural networks and optimization methods based on swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms may improve process of development, as well as accuracy of traffic noise prediction models.

Due to the randomness and weak symmetry of traffic accidents occurring in the expressway maintenance operation area, it is difficult to use the number of traffic accidents to evaluate the safety of maintenance operation areas. In this paper, the traffic characteristics and traffic conflicts of the maintenance operation area with the lane closed on the outside of the two-way four-lane expressway are studied. By using the statistical method, the distribution of vehicle speed and time headway in different areas of the maintenance operation area are analyzed, and the queuing characteristics of vehicles in the upstream transition zone of the expressway are determined. Based on improved time to collision (TTC) model, the traffic conflict severity of expressway maintenance operation area is divided. The negative binomial distribution is used to establish a traffic conflict prediction model for the enclosed maintenance area of the outer lane of the expressway, and the validity of the traffic conflict prediction model is verified based on the average absolute error percentage (MAPE). The research results show that: when the 0 < TTC < 1.3 s, the traffic conflict is serious conflict; when 1.3 s < TTC, the traffic conflict is non-serious conflict. Furthermore, the traffic conflict prediction model has high accuracy, the MAPE of the warning area and the upstream transition area are 10.8% and 5.0%, respectively.

Based on the traffic situation, vessel type and atmospheric condition, an inland waterway traffic noise prediction model was developed for environmental assessment in China. This model was developed from the Germany Richtlinien für den Lärmschutz an Straßen (RLS 90) model by adding the water surface condition, absorption and gradient along vessel travel direction correction terms to the governing equations. The re-described parameters, including traffic flow and composition, vessel speed, air absorption, and water surface, ground and atmospheric conditions, etc., were chosen as inputs into the calculating equations. The verification results showed that the absolute error between the predicted and measured noise levels within the range of ± 1.4 dBA was 82.9%. The mean difference between the predicted and measured noise levels was 0.02 ± 1.25 dBA. The comparison results with the RLS 90 model and the modified Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) model also showed that the developed model in this study had better precision and accuracy.

Noise emitted by traffic is, in addition to other causative factors, influenced by the gradient of the highway. In this work, vehicles were classified into 4 categories based on traffic noise levels of individual vehicles and homogeneity. Traffic noise data from individual vehicles was collected at 7 sites with different gradients on a state highway near Mandya city, Karnataka state, India. A gradient-based noise prediction mathematical model was developed for each category of vehicle by multiple regression analysis of data. Results from the model indicated that the gradient has more influence on traffic noise due to heavy vehicles than light and medium classes of vehicles. The models developed herein were calibrated from field observed data.

International scale implementation of the CNOSSOS-EU road traffic noise prediction model for epidemiological studies

Modeling urban traffic noise with stochastic and deterministic traffic models

A technique has been developed for predicting road traffic noise for environmental assessment, taking into account traffic volume as well as road surface conditions. The ASJ model (ASJ Prediction Model for Road Traffic Noise, 1999), which is based on the sound power level of the noise emitted by the interaction between the road surface and tires, employs regression models for two road surface types: dense-graded asphalt (DGA) and permeable asphalt (PA). However, these models are not applicable to other types of road surfaces. Accordingly, this paper introduces a parameter estimation procedure for ASJ-based noise prediction models, utilizing a harmony search (HS) algorithm. Traffic noise measurement data for four different vehicle types were used in the algorithm to determine the regression parameters for several road surface types. The parameters of the traffic noise prediction models were evaluated using another measurement set, and good agreement was observed between the predicted and measured sound power levels.

Traffic noise prediction models are crucial for designing highways to implement preventive measures against traffic noise pollution by analyzing future trends. This study aims to identify the traffic, road geometrical, and environmental parameters that escalate traffic noise pollution, enabling rectification of influencing factors and enhancement of strategies to reduce this pollution. A traffic noise prediction model was developed for the highways of Delhi-NCR using the Multiple Regression approach, incorporating various traffic, geometric, and environmental parameters. Statistical analysis was conducted, and the model was formulated based on data collected from 31 sampling stations on two major Delhi highways. Significant variables identified include the number of lanes, average building height, international roughness index, temperature, wind speed, and humidity. The model’s validity is affirmed by a coefficient of determination R2 = 0.75, indicating a good fit.

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.

Traffic flow has the characteristics of randomness, nonlinearity and periodicity. Using deep learning as the method of traffic flow prediction can make full use of traffic flow characteristics for prediction. In this paper, a recurrent neural network-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) model and its variant GRU (Gated Recurrent Units) are used to solve the traffic flow prediction problem. According to the road traffic information collected by the automatic measurement station (LAM) of the Dutch traffic management department, the vehicle traffic flow data has been predicted every five minutes. It’s verified that the GRU traffic flow prediction model performs well by comparing the prediction accuracy of LSTM and GRU.

To address the issue of spatiotemporal illusion in short-term traffic flow prediction and deeply explore the underlying short-term traffic flow network characteristics, a traffic flow prediction model that combines long-term spatiotemporal heterogeneity with short-term spatiotemporal features is proposed. In the long-term spatiotemporal branch, the Transformer structure is employed, and a self-supervised masking mechanism is utilized to pretrain the heterogeneity in long-term temporal and spatial dimensions separately. Additionally, a spatiotemporal adaptive module is designed, which adapts to and guides short-term traffic flow prediction across time series and traffic flow networks. In the short-term spatiotemporal branch, a recurrent neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) module is devised. This module is capable of continuously and dynamically adjusting short-term spatiotemporal features, better capturing and exploring potential short-term spatiotemporal characteristics. Through multiple cycles, this module gradually and accurately extracts and compresses road network features, integrates the adapted spatiotemporal heterogeneity, and reconstructs future short-term traffic flows in the decoder. Experiments are conducted on four traffic flow and two traffic speed datasets, showing that compared to traditional time series models, the proposed model’s prediction accuracy indicators have relatively improved by 45.09%, 39.14%, and 0.47% on average; compared to recurrent neural network (RNN) series models, the improvements are 18.91%, 15.77%, and 0.18% on average; compared to graph convolution series models, the improvements are 21.31%, 16.65%, and 0.21% on average; and compared to Transformer series models, the improvements are 6.57%, 6.23%, and 0.05% on average. The model’s general applicability and good performance in transportation speed scenarios were verified through a multi-step experiment conducted on the transportation speed dataset.