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Road Traffic Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks

Conference Paper · September 2018

DOI: 10.23919/SEEDA-CECNSM.2018.8544943

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 Road Traffic Prediction Using Artificial Neural
Networks

Ioannis Loumiotis, Konstantinos Demestichas, Evgenia Adamopoulou, Pavlos Kosmides, Vasilis Asthenopoulos,
Efstathios Sykas
Institute of Communication and Computer Systems
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
National Technical University of Athens
Athens, Greece
i_loumiotis@cn.ntua.gr

Abstract—The tremendous growth of the transportation
systems and the increased number of vehicles during the last
decades has created a significant problem in urban areas, that of
traffic congestion. Traffic congestion increases the fuel
consumption, causes air pollution and costs many hours per year
to the drivers. In the current paper, a novel system targeted to
predict the road traffic, using intelligent agents, is proposed. The
accurate prediction of traffic will enable the road operators to
proactively take appropriate measures, such as changing the
traffic light strategy to alleviate the congestion problem. For the
prediction process of the intelligent agents, artificial neural
networks are employed in order to estimate the vehicles’ speed on
the road as an indicator of the traffic congestion. The results
showed that the proposed system provides high accuracy with a
mean absolute percentage error of about 6.2%.
Keywords—road traffic; prediction; speed; artificial neural
networks; general regression neural network
I. INTRODUCTION
During the last decades there has been a tremendous growth
in the number of vehicles moving in all the industrial countries.
Unfortunately, the extension of the roadways has not kept up
with the growth in the number of the vehicles resulting to the
well-known problem that all cities face nowadays, that of traffic
congestion. Traffic congestion is considered as one of the major
transportation issues in big cities and drivers are spending many
hours in traffic, directly impacting their life quality. Apart from
that, traffic congestion also increases the fuel consumption,
causes air pollution and is considered as a major factor of the
greenhouse effect. In particular, Data company Inrix [1]
conducted a study on the traffic in 240 cities in USA and
concluded that the average US commuter spends 42 hours in
traffic per year and loses $1,400 idling away gas.
The most common approach used by many cities to tackle
this problem is the use of traffic policemen to regulate the traffic
flow during the peak hours. This approach can alleviate the
traffic congestion but is considered old-fashioned wasting a
number of human resources that can be used in more productive
ways. Apart from that, there has been a number of different
solutions proposed to address the problem of congestion; namely
the use of tolls in order to enter major commuting roads during
peak hours, the improvement of the infrastructure and the
promotion of public transportation [2]. The first solution is
usually rejected for political reasons, as it would favor the
wealthier commuters. Unfortunately, the second solution cannot
be considered viable due to both the high cost of increasing the
road capacity and space limitations in big cities. One notable
approach towards this solution, is the development of
underground tunnels with car elevators proposed by Elon Musk
[3] in order to solve the traffic congestion problem. Concerning
the latter solution, governments are always trying to promote the
use of public transportation as an eco-friendly way to reduce
traffic congestion and air pollution in big cities. Unfortunately,
such campaigns rarely succeed and only few citizens adopt this
method for their transportation.
It becomes apparent that new and novel approaches are
required in order to address the traffic congestion issue. In this
scope, the current paper proposes a novel approach for traffic
congestion using intelligent agents. These intelligent agents will
collect, store and process the road traffic data in order to predict
the forthcoming traffic flow enabling road operators to be able
to proactively take appropriate measures, such as changing the
traffic light strategy, and individuals to be able to use alternative
routes to their destination. Specifically, the intelligent agents
will employ artificial neural networks in order to predict the
forthcoming speed in the road as an indicator of the traffic
congestion. Artificial neural networks have been widely used in
the literature to address non-linear problems and they are
considered as an appropriate selection for the road traffic due to
its nonlinear characteristics. The functionality of the proposed
scheme is tested and validated using real data collected by a
vehicle detection system (VDS) in Attica Tollway in Athens,
Greece.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents the related work in literature. In Section III, the
proposed scheme based on neural networks is analyzed in detail
and the collected measurements are preprocessed in order to
find the periodicities and the input variables to the prediction
model. The experimental results are described in Section IV
where the proposed scheme is validated and compared with
other neural networks. Finally, Section V concludes the paper.
 II. RELATED WORK
The are many studies in the literature that deal with the road
traffic prediction problem. In [4], the authors provide an
extensive review of literature on short-term traffic predictions.
The majority of the research work in the literature employs
artificial neural network in order to address the problem of
traffic prediction. In [5], More et al. study the problem of road
traffic prediction using artificial neural networks. Specifically,
they use the Jordan sequential network for a short-term
prediction of the traffic flow and they observe an accuracy of
about 92%-98%. In [6], the authors propose the use of deep
learning algorithms for short-term traffic flow prediction.
Another deep learning approach is presented in [7], where the
authors use deep learning algorithms in order to predict traffic
congestion and its duration achieving an accuracy of 63% in
predicting the accuracy of congestion. In [8], the authors propose
a convolutional neural network approach in order to predict the
short-term traffic speed. Specifically, the conclude that their
scheme provides an average mean absolute error of 5.23 km/h
for a five-minute prediction and a 6.12 km/h error for a thirty
minutes prediction.
Other approaches to address the problem of traffic prediction
include the works in [9] - [12]. In [9], Jia et al. propose a traffic
prediction system based on the sliding window autoregressive
integrated moving average (SWARIMA) method. In [10], a
combined forecasting model based on gray Verhulst model and
Markov chain is used in order to deal with the nonlinear and
uncertain characteristics of short-term traffic flow. In [11], the Fig. 1. Graphical representation of the proposed scheme with intelligent
agents.
authors propose a short-term traffic forecasting method based on
manifold similarity that use manifold distance to predict the the prediction will enable the road operator to proactively take
traffic state and compare their algorithm with traditional measures to alleviate the traffic congestion such as adapting the
autoregressive models. They show that their scheme traffic light strategy.
outperforms the traditional autoregressive models providing a
mean absolute percentage error of 5.285%. In [12], the authors B. Prediction Model
present a bus arrival prediction system using a clustering The main challenge of the proposed intelligent agent scheme
algorithm to learn the time variant distributions of the travel is the prediction of the forthcoming speed in the road as an
times of path sections between any two bus stops. Their method indicator of the road traffic congestion. For this purpose, the
results in a mean absolute percentage error of about 15%. agent has to process large amounts of data in a short period of
time. Based on these requirements, a General Regression Neural
In the current paper, the authors employ artificial neural Network (GRNN) [13] is considered as more appropriate for the
networks in order to accurately estimate the vehicles’ speed on prediction process. GRNN is a one-pass neural network used for
the road as an indicator of the traffic congestion, taking into estimating continuous variables. Its main advantages are the fast
consideration the real time requirements and the special learning ability and the convergence to the optimal surface, and
characteristics and periodicities of the data. thus it has been widely used for forecasting purposes. In short,
III. INTELLIGENT ROAD TRAFFIC PREDICTION assuming that the input data consist of pairs of (x, y), where x is
a vector random variable and y a scalar random variable, the
A. Intelligent Agents resulting estimation is given by
The efficient management of the road traffic foresees
appropriate intelligent agents that will be deployed in order to
monitor the current traffic situation and predict the forthcoming ∑ exp −
speed of the road as an indicator of the traffic congestion. The 2 (1)
=
graphical representation of the proposed scheme is depicted in
Fig. 1. Specifically, the intelligent agents will collect, store and ∑ exp −
2
process the traffic flow data. Based on the collected data, the
agent will learn the traffic pattern of the road and predict the = − − (2)
forthcoming traffic flows. For this purpose, the agents will
employ artificial neural network (ANN) schemes that can
accurately predict the estimated speed of the vehicles as an where X is a particular measured value of the random variable
indicator of the forthcoming traffic congestion. The accuracy of x, n is the number of the observations, Xi and Yi are sample
values of the random variables x and y, and σ is the smoothing
parameter. More details about the algorithm can be found in
[13].
The output of the algorithm can be interpreted as a weighted
average of the observed values Yi where each Yi is weighted
exponentially according to its Euclidean distance from X.
One of the challenging issues regarding this algorithm is the
selection on the value of the smoothing parameters σ. If σ is
selected large then the estimated density is smooth, while if σ is
selected small, then the estimated density has non-Gaussian
shapes, but at the distant points may have a great effect on the
estimate.
C. Collected Measurements
In order to validate the proposed scheme, a set of road traffic
data collected by a VDS in Attica Tollway, a modern urban
motorway with two separate directional carriageways, is used.
The collected data consist of 2862 hourly averaged
measurements referring to a period of about 4 months.
Intuitively, it is reasonable to expect that there should be
certain periodicities in the road traffic pattern which correspond
to the habitual behavior of the drivers, i.e. using the same road
Fig. 3. Traffic pattern of average speed for a period of one week (168
every day. In order to specify such periodicities, the Fourier hours).
transformation has been employed. Fig. 2 presents the results of
the Fourier transformation over the hourly collected data. As it consists mainly of the day and time in which the measurements
can be easily observed by the results, there is a dominant period were collected and the output is the hourly-based averaged speed
of 24-hours in the data. This can also be observed in Fig. 3 where of the vehicles in the road. Assuming that x is a vector variable
a small portion of the data is depicted for illustrative purposes. that denoted the input of the prediction model and y is a scalar
D. Model Parameters variable that denoted the output, it holds that
As it has been demonstrated in the previous section, the x = (year, month, day, time) (3)
average speed of vehicles in the road experience certain
periodicities related with time. As explained above, this is where year, month, day, time is the specific year (i.e. 2017),
mainly due to the habitual behavior of the drivers and the driver month (i.e. 10), day (i.e. 22) and time (i.e. 19:00) of the collected
profiles. As a result, the set of inputs for the prediction model measurement.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
It can be easily understood that the efficiency of the proposed
scheme depends on the accuracy of the prediction results. In
order to demonstrate the appropriateness of the GRNN, the
authors compare the result of the validation process of the
GRNN with a variety of neural network algorithms. In
particular, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with
three and four layers [14], and a group method for data handling
(GMDH) neural network [15] have been used. The optimal
parameters for the MLP neural networks were calculated by
constructing multiple networks, which were evaluated using 4-
fold cross validation, while for the case of the GRNN the
conjugate gradient algorithm was used. For the case of the
GMDH neural network a quadratic polynomial was constructed.
In order to evaluate the performance of the prediction model,
the authors used the 10-fold cross validation technique [16],
whilst the mean absolute error (MAE) and the mean absolute
percentage error (MAPE) is used to compare the performance of
the different models. The results are depicted in TABLE I. As it
Fig. 2. The fast Fourier transformation result of the collected data. can be easily seen the GRNN network outperforms the other
types of neural networks providing a MAPE of 6.2% for σ=0.05
and a MAE of 4.39 km/h. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can
provide a 16% improvement in MAE for the short-term Mean Absolute Percentage Error with respect to sigma (σ) values
prediction as proposed in [8]. 34
32
TABLE I. PREDICTION RESULTS FOR DIFFERENT TYPES OF NEURAL 30
NETWORKS
28

Mean Absolute Percentage Error (%)

Mean Absolute Error Mean Absolute 26
(km/h) Percentage Error (%) 24
Results
Training Prediction Training Prediction 22
Phase Phase Phase Phase 20
GRNN 18
1.69 4.39 2.37 6.2
(σ=0.05) 16
GMDH
7.64 7.71 11.14 11.31 14
(quadratic) 12
MLP (3-3-1) 7.26 6.83 10.15 9.49 10
8
MLP (3-6-4-1) 7.56 7.98 11.1 11.54 6
4
2

In Fig. 4 and Fig. 5, the MAE and the MAPE with respect to 0
0.02 0.05 0.07 0.09 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.5 0.7 1
different values of the smoothing parameter σ are depicted for σ
both training and prediction phase. As it can be observed, the
GRNN network performs better than the other types of neural MAPE Train MAPE Prediction

network in a wide range of 0.02<σ<0.2. Fig. 5. Mean absolute percentage error with respect to σ values.

cost onboard unit (OBD-II) connected to the user’s smartphone.

Mean Absolute Error with respect to sigma (σ) values
The users’ smartphones can also be used without the onboard
22
unit, providing, however, less accurate results. The collected
20 data will be used to validate the proposed scheme with more
18 information from the road segments both in urban and rural
areas. Intuitively, due to the characteristics of the GRNN, it is
16
expected that the proposed scheme can provide accurate results
Mean Absolute Error (km/h)

14 in both of these environments simply by fine-tuning parameter

12 σ. In addition, further algorithms based on deep learning will be
validated in order to optimize the proposed scheme.
10

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0,02 0,05 0,07 0,09 0,1
MAE Train
Fig. 4. Mean absolute error with respect to σ values.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In the current paper, the problem of road traffic estimation
was studied and a novel scheme based on artificial neural
networks was proposed in order to estimate the speed of a road
as an indicator to the traffic congestion. In order to validate the
proposed scheme an artificial neural network was designed and
implemented based on the GRNN algorithm. The validity of the
proposed scheme was studied and a σ analysis of the GRNN
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