Route Identification Method for On-Ramp Traffic at Adjacent Intersections of Expressway Entrance

To determine the control strategy at intersections adjacent to the expressway on-ramp, a route identification method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and dynamic time warping (DTW) is established. First, the de-noise function of EMD method is applied to eliminate disturbances and extract features and trends of traffic data. Then, DTW is used to measure the similarity of traffic volume time series between intersection approaches and expressway on-ramp. Next, a three-dimensional feature vector is built for every intersection approach traffic flow, including DTW distance, space distance between on-ramp and intersection approach, and intersection traffic volume. Fuzzy C-means clustering method is employed to cluster intersection approaches into classifications and identify critical routes carrying the most traffic to the on-ramp. The traffic data are collected by inductive loops at Xujiahui on-ramp of North and South Viaduct Expressway and surrounding intersections in Shanghai, China. The result shows that the proposed method can achieve route classification among intersections for different time periods in one day, and the clustering result is significantly influenced by three dimensions of traffic flow feature vector. As an illustrative example, micro-simulation models are built with different control strategies. The simulation shows that the coordinated control of critical routes identified by the proposed method has a better performance than coordinated control of arterial roads. Conclusions demonstrated that the proposed route identification method could provide a theoretical basis for the coordinated control of traffic signals among intersections and on-ramp. Document type: Articl

An efficient MapReduce-based parallel clustering algorithm for distributed traffic subarea division

Traffic subarea division is vital for traffic system management and traffic network analysis in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Since existing methods may not be suitable for big traffic data processing, this paper presents a MapReduce-based Parallel Three-Phase K -Means (Par3PKM) algorithm for solving traffic subarea division problem on a widely adopted Hadoop distributed computing platform. Specifically, we first modify the distance metric and initialization strategy of K -Means and then employ a MapReduce paradigm to redesign the optimized K -Means algorithm for parallel clustering of large-scale taxi trajectories. Moreover, we propose a boundary identifying method to connect the borders of clustering results for each cluster. Finally, we divide traffic subarea of Beijing based on real-world trajectory data sets generated by 12,000 taxis in a period of one month using the proposed approach. Experimental evaluation results indicate that when compared with K -Means, Par2PK-Means, and ParCLARA, Par3PKM achieves higher efficiency, more accuracy, and better scalability and can effectively divide traffic subarea with big taxi trajectory data

A decision support system to design water supply and sewer pipes replacement intervention programs

Article number 107967Asset management in hydraulic infrastructures aims for the long-term sustainability of water distribution and wastewater networks. Strategic maintenance planning has thus been deeply analyzed in the literature for indi vidual water and sewer pipes. However, water utilities do not plan and perform replacement activities on in dividual elements, but rather on coherent aggregations of neighboring pipes. We have developed a decision support system (DSS) to help water utilities design intervention programs for hydraulic infrastructures. It in tegrates a two-stage algorithm that groups water supply and sewer pipes into practical and efficient replacement works, based upon their proximity and their priority of renewal. A multi-objective genetic algorithm optimizes the work programs configurations while integrating the water company’s strategic policy into an innovative multi-objective function. We have applied our methodology to a large water company in Spain and illustrated this application with a sensitivity analysis to determine how the company’s strategic criteria influences the resulting work configurations.Empresa Metropolitana de Abastecimiento y Saneamiento de Aguas de Sevilla (EMASESA) 273/17, 286/1

Dynamic Vehicular Trajectory Optimization for Bottleneck Mitigation and Safety Improvement

Traffic bottleneck is defined as a disruption of traffic flow through a freeway or an arterial, which can be divided as two categories: stationary bottleneck and moving bottleneck. The stationary bottleneck is mainly formed by the lane drops in the multi-lane roadways, while the moving bottleneck are due to the very slowing moving vehicles which disrupt the traffic flow. Traffic bottlenecks not only impact the mobility, but also potentially cause safety issues. Traditional strategies for eliminating bottlenecks mainly focus on expanding supply including road widening, green interval lengthening and optimization of intersection channelization. In addition, a few macroscopic methods are also made to optimize the traffic demand such as routing optimization, but these studies have some drawbacks due to the limitations of times and methodologies. Therefore, this research utilizes the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) technology to develop several cooperative trajectory optimization models for mitigating mobility and safety impact caused by the urban bottlenecks. The multi-phases algorithms is developed to help solve the model, where a multi-stage-based nonlinear programming procedure is developed in the first phase to search trajectories that eliminate the conflicts in the bottleneck and minimize the travel time and the remaining ones refine the trajectories with a mixed integer linear programming to minimize idling time of vehicles, so that fuel consumption and emissions can be lowered down. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted towards those models and they imply that several indices may significantly impact the effectiveness and even cause the models lose efficacy under extreme values. Various illustrative examples and sensitivity analyses are provided to validate the proposed models. Results indicate that (a) the model is effective to mitigate the mobility and safety impact of bottleneck under the appropriate environment; (b) the model could simultaneously optimize the trajectories of vehicles to lower down fuel consumption and emissions; (c) Some environment indices may significantly impact the models, and even cause the model to lose efficacy under extreme values. Application of the developed models under a real-world case illustrates its capability of providing informative quantitative measures to support decisions in designing, maintaining, and operating the intelligent transportation management

Intelligent Traffic Management: From Practical Stochastic Path Planning to Reinforcement Learning Based City-Wide Traffic Optimization

This research focuses on intelligent traffic management including stochastic path planning and city scale traffic optimization. Stochastic path planning focuses on finding paths when edge weights are not fixed and change depending on the time of day/week. Then we focus on minimizing the running time of the overall procedure at query time utilizing precomputation and approximation. The city graph is partitioned into smaller groups of nodes and represented by its exemplar. In query time, source and destination pairs are connected to their respective exemplars and the path between those exemplars is found. After this, we move toward minimizing the city wide traffic congestion by making structural changes include changing the number of lanes, using ramp metering, varying speed limit, and modifying signal timing is possible. We propose a multi agent reinforcement learning (RL) framework for improving traffic flow in city networks. Our framework utilizes two level learning: a) each single agent learns the initial policy and b) multiple agents (changing the environment at the same time) update their policy based on the interaction with the dynamic environment and in agreement with other agents. The goal of RL agents is to interact with the environment to learn the optimal modification for each road segment through maximizing the cumulative reward over the set of possible actions in state space

Region-based Dynamic Weighting Probabilistic Geocoding

Geocoding has been a widely used technology in daily life and scientific research for at least four decades. Especially in scientific research, geocoding has been used as a generator of spatial data for further analysis. These uses have made it extremely important that geocoding results be as accurate as possible. Existing global-weighting approaches to geocoding assume spatial stationarity of addressing systems and address data characteristic distributions across space, resulting in heuristics and approaches that apply global parameters to produce geocodes for addresses in all regions. However, different regions in the United States (US) have different values and densities of address attributes, which increases the error of standard algorithms that assume global parameters and calculation weights. Region-based dynamic weighting can be used in probabilistic geocoding approaches to stabilize and reduce incorrect match probability assignments that are due to place-specific naming conventions which vary region-to-region across the US. This study tested the spatial accuracy and time efficiency of a region-based dynamic weighting probabilistic geocoding system, as compared to a set of manually corrected geocoding results within Los Angeles City. The results of this study show that the region-based dynamic weighting probabilistic method improves the spatial accuracy of geocoding results and has a moderate influence on the time efficiency of the geocoding system