Freeway Travel Time Estimation and Prediction Using Dynamic Neural Networks

Authors

Luou Shen, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Major/Program

Civil Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Mohammed Hadi

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Albert Gan

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Fang Zhao

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Zhenmin Chen

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

Trajectory Method, Intelligent Transportation System, Travel Time Prediction, Travel Time Estimation, Dynamic Neural Networks, Traffic Detector

Date of Defense

7-16-2008

Abstract

Providing transportation system operators and travelers with accurate travel time information allows them to make more informed decisions, yielding benefits for individual travelers and for the entire transportation system. Most existing advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) and advanced traffic management systems (ATMS) use instantaneous travel time values estimated based on the current measurements, assuming that traffic conditions remain constant in the near future. For more effective applications, it has been proposed that ATIS and ATMS should use travel times predicted for short-term future conditions rather than instantaneous travel times measured or estimated for current conditions. This dissertation research investigates short-term freeway travel time prediction using Dynamic Neural Networks (DNN) based on traffic detector data collected by radar traffic detectors installed along a freeway corridor. DNN comprises a class of neural networks that are particularly suitable for predicting variables like travel time, but has not been adequately investigated for this purpose. Before this investigation, it was necessary to identifying methods for data imputation to account for missing data usually encountered when collecting data using traffic detectors. It was also necessary to identify a method to estimate the travel time on the freeway corridor based on data collected using point traffic detectors. A new travel time estimation method referred to as the Piecewise Constant Acceleration Based (PCAB) method was developed and compared with other methods reported in the literatures. The results show that one of the simple travel time estimation methods (the average speed method) can work as well as the PCAB method, and both of them out-perform other methods. This study also compared the travel time prediction performance of three different DNN topologies with different memory setups. The results show that one DNN topology (the time-delay neural networks) out-performs the other two DNN topologies for the investigated prediction problem. This topology also performs slightly better than the simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network topology that has been used in a number of previous studies for travel time prediction.

Identifier

FI08121916

Recommended Citation

Shen, Luou, "Freeway Travel Time Estimation and Prediction Using Dynamic Neural Networks" (2008). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 17.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/17