Statistical density prediction in traffic networks

Abstract

Recently, modern tracking methods started to allow capturing the position of massive numbers of moving objects. Given this information, it is possible to analyze and predict the traffic density in a network which offers valuable information for traffic control, congestion prediction and prevention. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical approach to predict the density on any edge of such a network at some time in the future. Our method is based on short-time observations of the traffic history. Therefore, knowing the destination of each traveling individual is not required. Instead, we assume that the individuals will act rationally and choose the shortest path from their starting points to their destinations. Based on this assumption, we introduce a statistical approach to describe the likelihood of any given individual in the network to be located at a certain position at a certain time. Since determining this likelihood is quite expensive when done in a straightforward way, we propose an efficient method to speed up the prediction which is based on a suffix-tree. In our experiments, we show the capability of our approach to make useful predictions about the traffic density and illustrate the efficiency of our new algorithm when calculating these predictions. Copyright © by SIAM.