Short-Term Intersection Traffic Flow Forecasting

The intersection is a bottleneck in an urban roadway network. As traffic demand increases, there is a growing congestion problem at urban intersections. Short-term traffic flow forecasting is crucial for advanced trip planning and traffic management. However, there are only a handful of existing models for forecasting intersection traffic flow. In addition, previous short-term traffic flow forecasting models usually were for predicting roadway conditions in a very short period, such as one minute or five minutes, which is often too late given that a driver may well be approaching the bottleneck already. Being able to accurately predict traffic congestions in about half-hour advance is very critical for advanced trip planning and traffic management. To fill this gap, this research develops a two-layer stacking model for intersection short-term traffic flow forecasting by integrating the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Elman Neural Network modeling methods. It was developed using the 24-h cycle by cycle traffic data collected at a signalized intersection in Jinan, China. The developed model is evaluated by applying it to the same intersection for forecasting the short-term traffic conditions in a different set of days. The prediction performance of this model was compared with four other models developed using some existing non-parametric modeling and machine learning methods, including clustering, backpropagation (BP) neural network, KNN, and Elman Neural Network. The results of this study indicate that the proposed model outperforms other existing models in terms of its prediction accuracy.