A short-term vehicle speed prediction approach considering dynamic traffic scene

Vehicle speed serves as a crucial indicator in traffic flow efficiency and safety evaluation. Previous researches typically utilize the time-series data of target vehicle speed or the relative speed and distance between the target and leading vehicles as speed prediction model input, which are suitable for stable and single-vehicle scenes. However, the surrounding traffic scenes dynamically changes during the vehicle’s driving process, the driver needs to allocate attention to the key scene vehicles in the surrounding traffic scenes and adjust the current speed based on these vehicles’ behavior. Therefore, this paper proposes a short-time vehicle speed prediction model considering the dynamic traffic scenes. A dynamic grid method is adopted to divide the target vehicle’s surrounding areas into left front, front, and right front regions. And key scene vehicles are identified based on each region’s state. Then the relative distance, speed, and acceleration data between the target vehicle and key scene vehicles are selected as model inputs. Vehicle trajectory data from the South-North No. 1 Expressway in Hefei and Ranger optimized Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) are utilized to train the speed prediction model. Experiment results indicated that under 1 s, 2 s, and 3 s prediction lengths, the model’s average Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) were 0.430 and 0.271 respectively. Compared to the speed prediction model considering the static traffic scenes, the average RMSE and MAE for the three prediction lengths have been reduced by 49.15 % and 56.02 % respectively.