Scalable System-Wide Traffic Flow Predictions Using Graph Partitioning and Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: Traffic flow predictions are an important part of an Intelligent Transportation System as the ability to forecast accurately the traffic conditions in a transportation system allows for proactive rather than reactive traffic control. Providing accurate real-time traffic predictions is a challenging problem because of the nonlinear and stochastic features of traffic flow. An increasingly widespread deployment of traffic sensors in a growing transportation system produces greater volume of traffic flow data. This results in problems concerning fast, reliable and scalable traffic predictions.The thesis explores the feasibility of increasing the scalability of real-time traffic predictions by partitioning the transportation system into smaller subsections. This is done by using data collected by Trafikverket from traffic sensors in Stockholm and Gothenburg to construct a traffic sensor graph of the transportation system. In addition, three graph partitioning algorithms are designed to divide the traffic sensor graph according to vehicle travel time. Finally, the produced transportation system partitions are used to train multi-layered long shortterm memory recurrent neural networks for traffic density predictions. Four different types of models are produced and evaluated based on root mean squared error, training time and prediction time, i.e. transportation system model, partitioned transportation models, single sensor models, and overlapping partition models.Results of the thesis show that partitioning a transportation system is a viable solution to produce traffic prediction models as the average prediction accuracy for each traffic sensor across the different types of prediction models are comparable. This solution tackles scalability issues that are caused by increased deployment of traffic sensors to the transportation system. This is done by reducing the number of traffic sensors each prediction model is responsible for which results in less complex models with less amount of input data. A more decentralized and effective solution can be achieved since the models can be distributed to the edge of the transportation system, i.e. near the physical location of the traffic sensors, reducing prediction and response time of the models.