IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Big Data Technology and Applications in Intelligent Transportation

During the last few years, information technology and transportation industries, along with automotive manufacturers and academia, are focusing on leveraging intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to improve services related to driver experience, connected cars, Internet data plans for vehicles, traffic infrastructure, urban transportation systems, traffic collaborative management, road traffic accidents analysis, road traffic flow prediction, public transportation service plan, personal travel route plans, and the development of an effective ecosystem for vehicles, drivers, traffic controllers, city planners, and transportation applications. Moreover, the emerging technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have provided unprecedented opportunities for the development and realization of innovative intelligent transportation systems where sensors and mobile devices can gather information and cloud computing, allowing knowledge discovery, information sharing, and supported decision making. However, the development of such data-driven ITS requires the integration, processing, and analysis of plentiful information obtained from millions of vehicles, traffic infrastructures, smartphones, and other collaborative systems like weather stations and road safety and early warning systems. The huge amount of data generated by ITS devices is only of value if utilized in data analytics for decision-making such as accident prevention and detection, controlling road risks, reducing traffic carbon emissions, and other applications which bring big data analytics into the picture

BIDIRECTIONAL LSTM AND KALMAN FILTER FOR PASSENGER FLOW PREDICTION ON BUS TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

Forecasting travel demand is a complex problem facing public transit operators. Passenger flow prediction is useful not only for operators, used for long-term planning and scheduling, but also for transit users. The time is quickly approaching that short-term passenger flow prediction will be expected as a matter of course by transit users. To address this expectation, a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network model (BDLSTM NN) and a Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network Kalman Filter model (BDLSTM KF) predict short-term passenger flow and based on the dependencies between passenger count and spatial-temporal features. A comprehensive preprocessing framework is proposed leveraging historical data and extracting bidirectional features of passenger flow. The proposed model is based on [1] but adapted, applied, and analysed to produce optimal results for passenger flow forecasting on a bus route. Building on [2], a BDLSTM architecture is then combined with a Kalman filter. The Kalman filter reduces the training and testing complexity required for passenger flow forecasting. The BDLSTM-based Kalman filter produces predictions with less uncertainty than each method alone. Evaluating the BDLSTM-based Kalman filter with two months of real-world data, one year apart shows positive improvements for short-term forecasting in high complexity bus networks. It is possible to see that the BDLSTM outperforms traditional machine and deep learning techniques used in this context