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Traffic signal control (TSC) can be described as a multi-agent cooperative game. To realize cooperation, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a significant approach, with communication being a core component. The large-scale traffic signals and the partially observable information in TSC pose a considerable challenge in finding the optimal joint control policy. This paper proposed a deep MARL model named attentional graph relations communications network (AGRCNet). Based on the Actor-Critic framework, AGRCNet designs a communication network to exchange observation information with agents to help obtain the optimal joint action, reducing the decision error caused by the partially observable condition. Specifically, through the communication network, the chain propagation of graph attention networks (GAT) and graph convolutional networks is used to expand the receptive domain of agents, improve communication efficiency and promote cooperative behavior. We simulate the traffic situation near the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in Simulation of Urban MObility. With a compound reward, our method performs best. Meanwhile, AGRCNet is applied to two abstract environments, and the results show that our approach can also adapt to dynamic agent relationships and is more efficient than comparison algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart cities can effectively improve urban life quality. But, with the rise in population size, there is an increase in the use of vehicles for transportation. In smart city development, traffic control and route planning are the primary tasks to address the problem of travel time estimation. It has become complex due to concerns of wrapped spatio-temporal data on dynamic real-time traffic conditions. The existing methods failed to estimate travel time efficiently due to not considering the spatio-temporal features and lack of computing resources. There is a need for a system like intelligent transportation system to monitor and accurately predict traffic flow to avoid traffic congestion and reduce the impact on the ecological system. This paper developed a novel hybrid deep learning model to estimate optimized travel time and possible trajectories. In this work, U-Net used to reduce the number of feature points for each temporal data and GNN is used to build the graph with connectivity between vehicular nodes. This hybrid model helps us predict traffic flow and aims to estimate accurate travel time from one location (node) to another. The model's performance is evaluated on the standard benchmark datasets Q-Traffic, TaxiBJ, and Chengdu. The experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly improves performance in extracting travel patterns and provides an optimal route with an estimated travel time than existing methods with RMSE 4%, MAE 20.49%, and MAPE 18%. The proposed model has accurately predicted the estimation of travel time of the vehicle for the given urban traffic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate traffic flow forecasting (TFF) is a prerequisite for urban traffic control and guidance, which has become the key to avoiding traffic congestion and improving traffic management in intelligent transportation systems. To precisely characterize the spatial structure of road networks and discover temporal and spatial characteristics, we propose an attention-based spatial–temporal adaptive dual-graph convolutional network (ASTA-DGCN) for TFF in this paper. Specifically, we employ a spatial–temporal attention module to explore the hidden temporal correlation information of traffic data and the implicit influence of weights among road network nodes and to further capture the dynamic influence of different spatial–temporal positions on the current spatial–temporal position. Then, we utilize an adaptive graph modeling module to automatically extract the one-way relationship between variables and integrate external knowledge into the module. The FastDTW algorithm is exploited to measure the similarity of road network nodes, and the non-Euclidean pairwise association between regions is encoded into graphs to discover the hidden temporal pattern similarity effectively. Furthermore, temporal and spatial correlations are explicitly modeled using dual-graph convolution and sequential convolution based on the obtained graphs to mine the spatial–temporal patterns in dynamic traffic flow, and the final prediction result is produced based on the weighted fusion of the output values of the recent, daily, and weekly components. Finally, the ASTA-DGCN algorithm is successfully applied to TFF on two real-world traffic datasets. The experimental results indicate that our ASTA-DGCN algorithm outperforms ARIMA, VAR, FNN, GCN, GAT, GWNet, STGCN, ASTGCN, and STSGCN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting future traffic state (e.g., traffic speed, volume, travel time, etc.) accurately is highly desirable for traffic management and control. However, network-wide traffic flow has complicated spatial-temporal dependencies, making it challenging to predict. This study proposes a multi-weighted graph 3D convolution network (MWG3D) to predict future network-wide traffic speed, considering the spatial-temporal heterogeneous effects of multiple external factors (i.e., points of interests (POIs), roadway physical characteristics and incidents). The network is composed of a Graph-3D convolution (G3D) module and an incident impact module. In G3D module, a weighted graph convolution is developed first, which extracts complex spatial dependencies of traffic flow considering heterogeneous effects of POIs and roadway physical characteristics. These external factors have great influence on the periodicity of human daily activities, which in turn cyclically affect traffic flow. The weighted graph convolution is further connected with 3D convolutions to extract temporal dependencies of traffic flow, accounting for temporal heterogeneous effects of these external factors. An incident impact module is separately developed to account for spatial-temporal heterogeneous effects of incidents. These external factors could lead to abrupt and temporary changes in traffic flow. The proposed network is evaluated on two real-world datasets. The results show that MWG3D outperforms a selection of the state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, the spatial-temporal heterogeneous effects of external factors are crucial to prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of internet technology and mobile devices, massive streaming data of spatiotemporal information is available for real-time data mining. Outlier detection is playing as one of the most important analysis tasks for trajectory stream processing, such as traffic control and urban planning. Existing work about this issue can be divided into two main categories: individual outlier detection (IOD) and group outlier detection (GOD). IOD focuses on detecting an individual trajectory outlier generated by a single moving object (e.g., an over-speeding car), while GOD aims to detect a group outlier generated by various moving objects (e.g., a group of cars influenced by a traffic jam). However, existing studies only support one of them and cannot comprehensively understand the traffic conditions by combining both of them. To this end, we propose a novel framework for real-time urban traffic outlier detection (RUTOD) in this paper. RUTOD contains IOD based on current traffic conditions and GOD according to historical data. In addition, we adopt a street-based trajectory division to accelerate investigation. Experimental results show that our proposal is not only effective but also efficient for detecting both individual outliers and group outliers in real-time scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A road accident risk map that is designed to locate high-risk areas is an efficient way to reduce road traffic injuries and fatalities. To produce an accurate road accident risk map, it is required to compute the probability of the accident's occurrence by considering the various variables that contribute to road accidents. To this end, this research proposed a generalized regression neural network tuned with self-organizing map to estimate the risk of road accidents. This hybrid predictive model estimates the road accident risk by considering 22 different predictor variables (features), including geographic characteristics, temporal conditions, weather conditions, road-related characteristics, vehicle-related characteristics, and driver characteristics calculated based on the authoritative data sources and volunteered geographic information (VGI). The required VGI was collected in this study by developing a third-party application that was run inside telegram messenger. To evaluate the performance and usability of the proposed model for estimation of the accident risk along the road, the developed model was applied to the Tabriz-Marand dual carriageway, Iran. In this sense, 30 different scenarios were designed, and for each scenario, the risk of the accident was predicted at 3008 points along the Tabriz-Marand dual carriageway. A quality assessment of the proposed approach for different scenarios demonstrated that the predicted accident risk had very high accuracy (average accuracy about 90.74%). According to the results of this research, distance from traffic control cameras, day of the week, driver's age, weather, elevation, and vehicle type were the most effective factors in high-risk areas of the study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban mobility is one of the critical challenges in modern cities that should be tackled carefully. The exponential growth of cars number badly impacts the transportation system (TS) on which most cities are living on. Traffic control is one of the most critical issues in TS, which depends on a set of cooperative traffic lights. Smart Traffic lights, which can receive and analyze traffic data, can solve traffic problems by efficiently predict the accurate waiting time for each traffic lane at the intersections. This can improve the traffic flow and accordingly promotes the transportation system performance. This paper introduces a Fog-Based Traffic Light Management Strategy (TLMS) based on Fuzzy Inference Engine. TLMS can accurately calculate the optimal waiting time for each traffic lane at the intersections to decrease the average waiting time for the stopped vehicles. TLMS applies Vehicle to infrastructure protocol (V2I) that allows vehicles to interact directly with the infrastructure of the road such as GPS sensors and the traffic light signals. At each traffic intersection, the number of waiting vehicles, their locations relative to TLMS, and their sizes are detected and sent to TLMS in real time. Then, based on fuzzy inference, TLMS can calculate the optimal waiting time for each lane, which optimizes the traffic flow at the intersection by minimizing the waiting time for the vehicles. The performance of the proposed TLMS has been compared and tested against recently proposed techniques via simulation. The results of the experiment showed that TLMS outperforms recent technologies as it minimizes the average waiting time of vehicles around the intersections and accordingly maximizes the performance of the traffic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic flow forecasting (TFF) is critical for constructing intelligent transportation systems and offering real-time traffic applications, and especially accurate flow forecasting based on traffic big data can drive reliable strategies for traffic management and control. To consider the weight of the influence of the spatial correlation among the road segments and capture the nonlinear characteristics of traffic flow, this paper presents a parallel Normal Distribution and Attention Mechanism Weighted Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (NAW-DBLSTM) algorithm on Spark. Specifically, we employ the resilient distributed data set (RDD) to preprocess large-scale mobile trajectory data (e.g., taxi GPS trajectory data), and then Kalman Filter (KF) is utilized to smooth the taxi trajectory big data. Next, the parallel NAW-DBLSTM algorithm is put forward on a Spark distributed computing platform to enhance the accuracy and scalability of TFF, combined with the attention mechanism and the normal distribution, and then the time window is used for TFF. Finally, the traffic flow is forecasted successfully on Spark by our NAW-DBLSTM algorithm with the real-world GPS trajectories of taxicabs. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with LSTM, BiLSTM, DBLSTM, DNN, SVR, KNN, SAEs, BP, CNN, GRU, and ANNs, NAW-DBLSTM can produce better performance with the MAPE value that is 85.1%, 80.1%, 85.8%, 73.1%, 78.2%, 77.9%, 78.8%, 84.6%, 96.4%, 86.2%, and 73.2% lower than that of comparable algorithms, respectively. Particularly, the MAPE value of NAW-DBLSTM is 28.3%, 20.1%, 71.1%, and 79.1% lower than that of LSTM weighted with the normal distribution and the attention mechanism (NAW-LSTM), BiLSTM weighted with the normal distribution and the attention mechanism (NAW-BiLSTM), DBLSTM weighted with the normal distribution (NW-DBLSTM), and NAW-DBLSTM weighted without the time window (NT-NAW-DBLSTM), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rapid growth of the number of passengers over the few recent decades, air traffic forecasting has become a crucial tool for digital transportation systems, playing a fundamental role in the planning and development of traffic management and control systems. The main goal of forecasting in air transport is to predict traffic conditions in a network, on the basis of its past behavior, in order to improve safety and reduce airspace congestion. Nevertheless, air traffic time series often present an intricate behavior because of their irregular trends and strong seasonalities. In this paper, the methodology based on time series decomposition and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is thus reviewed and reconsidered within this framework of air traffic management. In this respect, a hybrid approach coupling feedforward neural networks with a nonlinear least squares-based regression curve fitting is developed for the multistep-ahead prediction. Empirical experiments are conducted in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on passenger traffic real datasets. The results show that, despite its simplicity, the base model is capable of generating accurate forecasts, with a performance comparable with that of powerful state-of-the-art forecasting models. In addition, there is evidence that trend pretreatment (wholly or partially) would rather degrade the forecasting accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban green wave traffic control system is one of the effective means to solve the problems of urban traffic jams and reduce vehicle delay. Aiming at the problems of traditional green wave traffic control in optimization computation, this paper introduces the adaptive mechanism and crossover, mutation operators to artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA) in order to adjust the evolution group. Through setting bulletin board measure and retention strategy, the individual status of the optimal artificial fish is recorded. In that way, the adaptive genetic AFSA is established. Finally, the paper applies this algorithm to green wave traffic control in five continuous intersections on Jianning Road, Lanzhou, China, gains one traffic control program better than traditional method through calculation, and verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of adaptive genetic-AFSA to optimize green wave traffic control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new method to solve the scheduling problem of adaptive traffic signal control at intersection. The method involves recursive least-squares temporal difference (RLS-TD(λ)) learning that is integrated into approximate dynamic programming. The learning mechanism of RLS-TD(λ) is to make an adaptation of linear function approximation by updating its parameters based on environmental feedback. This study investigates the method implementation after modeling a traffic dynamic system at intersection in discrete time. In the model, different traffic control schemes regarding signal phase sequence are considered, especially the defined adaptive phase sequence (APS). By simulating traffic scenarios, RLS-TD(λ) is superior to TD(λ) for updating functional parameters in the approximation, and APS outperforms other conventional control schemes on reducing traffic delay. By comparing with other traffic signal control algorithms, the proposed algorithm yields satisfying results in terms of traffic delay and computation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban traffic congestion is a common problem that affects many cities around the world. In this paper, an actual urban traffic simulation model (AUTM) for traffic congestion predicting and avoiding is proposed, which includes three key components: the map and transfer (MT) conversion method, the optimized spatial evolution rules, and a congestion-avoidance routing algorithm. Three key techniques are combined in our proposed model: (1) The MT conversion method is proposed to get actual urban cellular spaces, which apply the optimized spatial evolution rules to simulate the vehicular dynamics better. (2) AUTM is proposed for simulating traffic congestion and predicting the effect of adding overpasses and roadblocks. (3) The congestion-avoidance routing algorithm is proposed for vehicles to dynamically update their routes toward their destinations, which can achieve traffic optimization in urban simulations. This paper presents the results of applying this novel model to a large-scale real-world case in different urban traffic congestion situations. Extensive experimental simulations in various actual cities have been carried out. Our results in the extreme case are encouraging: The prediction accuracy of traffic congestions is almost 89%, and the variance of prediction road density is less than 0.15. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transportation problem (TP) is an important supply chain optimization problem in the traffic engineering. This paper maximizes the total profit over a three-tiered distribution system consisting of plants, distribution centers (DCs) and customers. Plants produce multiple products that are shipped to DCs. If a DC is used, then a fixed cost (FC) is charged. The customers are supplied by a single DC. To characterize the uncertainty in the practical decision environment, this paper considers the unit cost of TP, FC, the supply capacities and demands as Gaussian type-2 fuzzy variables. To give a modeling framework for optimization problems with multifold uncertainty, different reduction methods were proposed to transform a Gaussian type-2 fuzzy variable into a type-1 fuzzy variable by mean reduction method and CV reduction method. Then, the TP was reformulated as a chance-constrained programming model enlightened by the credibility optimization methods. The deterministic models are then solved using two different soft computing techniques-generalized reduced gradient and modified particle swarm optimization, where the position of each particle is adjusted according to its own experience and that of its neighbors. The numerical experiments illustrated the application and effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an improvement of borrowing channel assignment (BCA) for patterned traffic load by using the short-term traffic prediction ability of cellular probabilistic self-organizing map (CPSOM). The fast growing cellular mobile systems demand more efficient and faster channel allocation techniques today. In case of patterned traffic load, the traditional BCA methods are not efficient to further enhance the performance because heavy-traffic cells cannot borrow channels from their neighboring cells with light or medium traffic that may have unused nominal channels. The performance can be increased if the short-term traffic load can be predicted. The predicted results can then be used for channel re-assignment. Therefore, the unused nominal channels of the light-or-medium-traffic cells can be transferred to the heavy-traffic cells that need more nominal channels. In this paper, CPSOM is used online for traffic prediction. In this sense, the proposed CPSOM-based BCA method is able to enhance the performance for patterned traffic load compared with the traditional BCA methods. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed method enables the system to work with better performance for patterned traffic load than the traditional BCA methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key component of the daily operation and planning activities of a traffic control centre is short-term forecasting, i.e. the prediction of daily to the next few days of traffic flow. Such forecasts have a significant impact on the optimal regulation of the road traffic on all kinds of freeways. They are increasingly important in an environment with increasing road traffic problems. The present paper aims at presenting the effectiveness of a neural network system for prediction based on time-series data. We only use one parameter, namely traffic volume for the forecasting. We employ artificial neural networks for traffic forecasting applied on a road section. Recurrent Jordan networks, popular in the modelling of time series, is examined in this study. Simulation results demonstrate that learning with this type of architecture has a good generalisation ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]