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Travel time forecasting has become a core component of smart transportation systems, which assists both travelers and traffic organizers with route planning, travel schedule adjustments, ride-sharing, navigation applications, and efficient traffic management. However, timely and accurate travel time forecasting still remains a critical challenge owing to the complex nonlinear and dynamic fluctuations of spatial–temporal dependencies. Also, spatial sparseness is a big issue in traffic forecasting, since adopting the implicit interactions between the close traffic regions leads to superficial characterization of spatio-temporal dependences. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based framework (STTG-TTE) that addresses these drawbacks and improves the travel time estimation. First, we build a geo-hashing algorithm for the data sparsity issue that incorporates fluctuations of nearby and distant traffic situations in terms of spatio-temporal dependencies. Second, a new spatio-temporal correlation modeling method is proposed to fully leverage large-scale spatial and temporal traffic patterns using temporal convolutional networks integrated with a gated multi-modality mechanism. Then, for external factors' representation, a new dual-gated Res-Net multi-modality-based module is proposed. Finally, we fuse these representations of multi-components dynamically and utilize the transformer model, which is conducive to learning intersections among these multiple factors for obtaining accurate prediction results. Experiments on two large-scale real-world traffic datasets from two different urban regions (Chengdu taxi-datsets and NYC-Bike datasets) demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to state-of-the-art baseline models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate travel time prediction is one of the most promising intelligent transportation system (ITS) services, which can greatly support route planning, ride-sharing, navigation applications, and effective traffic management. Several factors, like spatial, temporal, and external, have big effects on traffic patterns, and therefore, it is important to develop a mechanism that can jointly capture correlations of these components. However, spatial sparsity issues make travel time prediction very challenging, especially when dealing with the origin-destination (OD) method, since the trajectory data may not be available. In this paper, we introduce a unified deep learning-based framework named joint spatial-temporal correlation (JSTC) mechanism to improve the accuracy of OD travel time prediction. First, we design a spatiotemporal correlation block that combines two modules: self-convolutional attention integrated with a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to capture the spatial correlations along with the temporal dependencies. Then, we enhance our model performance through adopting a multi-head attention module to learn the attentional weights of the spatial, temporal, and external features based on their contributions to the output and speed up the training process. Extensive experiments on three large-scale real-world traffic datasets (NYC, Chengdu, and Xi'an) show the efficiency of our model and its superiority compared to other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]