Traffic Prediction using Artificial Intelligence: Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Opportunities

Traffic prediction plays a crucial role in alleviating traffic congestion which represents a critical problem globally, resulting in negative consequences such as lost hours of additional travel time and increased fuel consumption. Integrating emerging technologies into transportation systems provides opportunities for improving traffic prediction significantly and brings about new research problems. In order to lay the foundation for understanding the open research challenges in traffic prediction, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of traffic prediction methodologies. Specifically, we focus on the recent advances and emerging research opportunities in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based traffic prediction methods, due to their recent success and potential in traffic prediction, with an emphasis on multivariate traffic time series modeling. We first provide a list and explanation of the various data types and resources used in the literature. Next, the essential data preprocessing methods within the traffic prediction context are categorized, and the prediction methods and applications are subsequently summarized. Lastly, we present primary research challenges in traffic prediction and discuss some directions for future research.Comment: Published in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (TR_C), Volume 145, 202

Intelligent Transportation Related Complex Systems and Sensors

Building around innovative services related to different modes of transport and traffic management, intelligent transport systems (ITS) are being widely adopted worldwide to improve the efficiency and safety of the transportation system. They enable users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, and smarter decisions on the use of transport networks. Current ITSs are complex systems, made up of several components/sub-systems characterized by time-dependent interactions among themselves. Some examples of these transportation-related complex systems include: road traffic sensors, autonomous/automated cars, smart cities, smart sensors, virtual sensors, traffic control systems, smart roads, logistics systems, smart mobility systems, and many others that are emerging from niche areas. The efficient operation of these complex systems requires: i) efficient solutions to the issues of sensors/actuators used to capture and control the physical parameters of these systems, as well as the quality of data collected from these systems; ii) tackling complexities using simulations and analytical modelling techniques; and iii) applying optimization techniques to improve the performance of these systems. It includes twenty-four papers, which cover scientific concepts, frameworks, architectures and various other ideas on analytics, trends and applications of transportation-related data

A review of travel time estimation and forecasting for advanced traveler information systems

Providing on line travel time information to commuters has become an important issue for Advanced Traveler Information Systems and Route Guidance Systems in the past years, due to the increasing traffic volume and congestion in the road networks. Travel time is one of the most useful traffic variables because it is more intuitive than other traffic variables such as flow, occupancy or density, and is useful for travelers in decision making. The aim of this paper is to present a global view of the literature on the modeling of travel time, introducing crucial concepts and giving a thorough classification of the existing tech- niques. Most of the attention will focus on travel time estimation and travel time prediction, which are generally not presented together. The main goals of these models, the study areas and methodologies used to carry out these tasks will be further explored and categorized

Real-time crash prediction models: State-of-the-art, design pathways and ubiquitous requirements

Proactive traffic safety management systems can monitor traffic conditions in real-time, identify the formation of unsafe traffic dynamics, and implement suitable interventions to bring unsafe conditions back to normal traffic situations. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, sensor fusion and algorithms have brought about the introduction of a proactive safety management system closer to reality. The basic prerequisite for developing such a system is to have a reliable crash prediction model that takes real-time traffic data as input and evaluates their association with crash risk. Since the early 21st century, several studies have focused on developing such models. Although the idea has considerably matured over time, the endeavours have been quite discrete and fragmented at best because the fundamental aspects of the overall modelling approach substantially vary. Therefore, a number of transitional challenges have to be identified and subsequently addressed before a ubiquitous proactive safety management system can be formulated, designed and implemented in real-world scenarios. This manuscript conducts a comprehensive review of existing real-time crash prediction models with the aim of illustrating the state-of-the-art and systematically synthesizing the thoughts presented in existing studies in order to facilitate its translation from an idea into a ready to use technology. Towards that journey, it conducts a systematic review by applying various text mining methods and topic modelling. Based on the findings, this paper ascertains the development pathways followed in various studies, formulates the ubiquitous design requirements of such models from existing studies and knowledge of similar systems. Finally, this study evaluates the universality and design compatibility of existing models. This paper is, therefore, expected to serve as a one stop knowledge source for facilitating a faster transition from the idea of real-time crash prediction models to a real-world operational proactive traffic safety management system

Methodological evolution and frontiers of identifying, modeling and preventing secondary crashes on highways

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Secondary crashes (SCs) or crashes that occur within the boundaries of the impact area of prior, primary crashes are one of the incident types that frequently affect highway traffic operations and safety. Existing studies have made great efforts to explore the underlying mechanisms of SCs and relevant methodologies have been e volving over the last two decades concerning the identification, modeling, and prevention of these crashes. So far there is a lack of a detailed examination on the progress, lessons, and potential opportunities regarding existing achievements in SC-related studies. This paper provides a comprehensive investigation of the state-of-the-art approaches; examines their strengths and weaknesses; and provides guidance in exploiting new directions in SC-related research. It aims to support researchers and practitioners in understanding well-established approaches so as to further explore the frontiers. Published studies focused on SCs since 1997 have been identified, reviewed, and summarized. Key issues concentrated on the following aspects are discussed: (i) static/dynamic approaches to identify SCs; (ii) parametric/non-parametric models to analyze SC risk, and (iii) deployable countermeasures to prevent SCs. Based on the examined issues, needs, and challenges, this paper further provides insights into potential opportunities such as: (a) fusing data from multiple sources for SC identification, (b) using advanced learning algorithms for real-time SC analysis, and (c) deploying connected vehicles for SC prevention in future research. This paper contributes to the research community by providing a one-stop reference for research on secondary crashes

A Taxonomy of Traffic Forecasting Regression Problems From a Supervised Learning Perspective

One contemporary policy to deal with traffic congestion is the design and implementation of forecasting methods that allow users to plan ahead of time and decision makers to improve traffic management. Current data availability and growing computational capacities have increased the use of machine learning (ML) to address traffic prediction, which is mostly modeled as a supervised regression problem. Although some studies have presented taxonomies to sort the literature in this field, they are mostly oriented to classify the ML methods applied and a little effort has been directed to categorize the traffic forecasting problems approached by them. As far as we know, there is no comprehensive taxonomy that classifies these problems from the point of view of both traffic and ML. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy to categorize the aforementioned problems from both traffic and a supervised regression learning perspective. The taxonomy aims at unifying and consolidating categorization criteria related to traffic and it introduces new criteria to classify the problems in terms of how they are modeled from a supervised regression approach. The traffic forecasting literature, from 2000 to 2019, is categorized using this taxonomy to illustrate its descriptive power. From this categorization, different remarks are discussed regarding the current gaps and trends in the addressed traffic forecasting area

A review of travel and arrival-time prediction methods on road networks: classification, challenges and opportunities

Transportation plays a key role in today’s economy. Hence, intelligent transportation systems have attracted a great deal of attention among research communities. There are a few review papers in this area. Most of them focus only on travel time prediction. Furthermore, these papers do not include recent research. To address these shortcomings, this study aims to examine the research on the arrival and travel time prediction on road-based on recently published articles. More specifically, this paper aims to (i) offer an extensive literature review of the field, provide a complete taxonomy of the existing methods, identify key challenges and limitations associated with the techniques; (ii) present various evaluation metrics, influence factors, exploited dataset as well as describe essential concepts based on a detailed analysis of the recent literature sources; (iii) provide significant information to researchers and transportation applications developer. As a result of a rigorous selection process and a comprehensive analysis, the findings provide a holistic picture of open issues and several important observations that can be considered as feasible opportunities for future research directions