Sequential Prediction for Large-Scale Traffic Incident Duration: Application and Comparison of Survival Models

Author(s):  
Xiaobing Li ◽  
Jun Liu ◽  
Asad Khattak ◽  
Shashi Nambisan

A quick and accurate traffic incident duration prediction could greatly facilitate traffic incident management. However, at the very early stage of an incident, limited information is available for prediction. Information gathering for large-scale traffic incidents is a chronological process when a multi-agency response is required. At the early stage, information such as incident start time and roadway and weather conditions may be available, but information about response agencies and incident management solutions (e.g., lane closures) remains unknown. The objective of this study is to develop a sequential prediction method to handle the chronological process of incident information gathering. The method is based upon parametric survival modeling, which is often utilized to predict incident duration. This study took advantage of a unique incident database and identified over 600 large-scale incidents in the East Tennessee area from 2015 to 2016. A five-stage prediction method is proposed according to the chronological process by which information becomes available during incident operations. Using the data, this study compared three survival models: frailty model, multilevel mixed-effects model, and finite mixture model. Generally, with more information becoming available for modeling from the first to the last stage, the models’ performance improved according to the root mean square error and mean absolute percent error. The finite mixture model outperforms the other two models and its mean absolute percentage error is between 10% and 15%. Incident-associated factors at each stage are discussed and implications based on the study outcomes are also covered in the paper.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiang Shang ◽  
Derong Tan ◽  
Song Gao ◽  
Linlin Feng

Predicting traffic incident duration is important for effective and real-time traffic incident management (TIM), which helps to minimize traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and secondary incident related to this incident. Traffic incident duration prediction methods often use more input variables to obtain better prediction results. However, the problems that available variables are limited at the beginning of an incident and how to select significant variables are ignored to some extent. In this paper, a novel prediction method named NCA-BOA-RF is proposed using the Neighborhood Components Analysis (NCA) and the Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA)-optimized Random Forest (RF) model. Firstly, the NCA is applied to select feature variables for traffic incident duration. Then, RF model is trained based on the training set constructed using feature variables, and the BOA is employed to optimize the RF parameters. Finally, confusion matrix is introduced to measure the optimized RF model performance and compare with other methods. In addition, the performance is also tested in the absence of some feature variables. The results demonstrate that the proposed method not only has high accuracy, but also exhibits excellent reliability and robustness.


Author(s):  
Haozhe Cong ◽  
Cong Chen ◽  
Pei-Sung Lin ◽  
Guohui Zhang ◽  
John Milton ◽  
...  

Highway traffic incidents induce a significant loss of life, economy, and productivity through injuries and fatalities, extended travel time and delay, and excessive energy consumption and air pollution. Traffic emergency management during incident conditions is the core element of active traffic management, and it is of practical significance to accurately understand the duration time distribution for typical traffic incident types and the factors that influence incident duration. This study proposes a dual-learning Bayesian network (BN) model to estimate traffic incident duration and to examine the influence of heterogeneous factors on the length of duration based on expert knowledge of traffic incident management and highway incident data collected in Zhejiang Province, China. Fifteen variables related to three aspects of traffic incidents, including incident information, incident consequences, and rescue resources, were included in the analysis. The trained BN model achieves favorable performance in several areas, including classification accuracy, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and the area under curve (AUC) value. A classification matrix, and significant variables and their heterogeneous influences are identified accordingly. The research findings from this study provide beneficial reference to the understanding of decision-making in traffic incident response and process, active traffic incident management, and intelligent transportation systems.


2013 ◽  
Vol 411-414 ◽  
pp. 2752-2757
Author(s):  
Jing Ru Gao

Reducing the duration of freeway traffic incident plays a significant role in improving the efficiency of freeway transportation. The duration of freeway traffic incidents is composed of four stages: the discovery time, response time, clearing time and the recovery time. Through analyzing the key factors influencing different duration stations, this article studies how factors including incident severity, aid resource allocation and emergency rescue preplan influence the duration, and pointedly propose countermeasures to reduce freeway traffic incidents duration. The conclusion of this article provides reference for improving the efficiency in freeway traffic incident management. Key words: traffic incident; duration; factor analysis; improve countermeasures


Author(s):  
Sai Chand ◽  
Ernest Yee ◽  
Abdulmajeed Alsultan ◽  
Vinayak V. Dixit

COVID-19 has had tremendous effects worldwide, resulting in large-scale death and upheaval. An abundance of studies have shown that traffic patterns have changed worldwide as working from home has become dominant, with many facilities, restaurants and retail services being closed due to the lockdown orders. With regards to road safety, there have been several studies on the reduction in fatalities and crash frequencies and increase in crash severity during the lockdown period. However, no scientific evidence has been reported on the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on traffic incident duration, a key metric for crash management. It is also unclear from the existing literature whether the impacts on traffic incidents are consistent across multiple lockdowns. This paper analyses the impact of two different COVID-19 lockdowns in Sydney, Australia, on traffic incident duration and frequency. During the first (31 March–28 April 2020) and second (26 June–31 August 2021) lockdowns, the number of incidents fell by 50% and 60%, respectively, in comparison to the same periods in 2018 and 2019. The proportion of incidents involving towing increased significantly during both lockdowns. The mean duration of crashes increased by 16% during the first lockdown, but the change was less significant during the subsequent lockdown. Crashes involving diversions, emergency services and towing saw an increase in the mean duration by 67%, 16%, and 47%, respectively, during the first lockdown. However, this was not reflected in the 2021 data, with only major crashes seeing a significant increase, i.e., by 58%. There was also a noticeable shift in the location of incidents, with more incidents recorded in suburban areas, away from the central business area. Our findings suggest drastic changes in incident characteristics, and these changes should be considered by policymakers in promoting a safer and more sustainable transportation network in the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weiwei Zhu ◽  
Jinglin Wu ◽  
Ting Fu ◽  
Junhua Wang ◽  
Jie Zhang ◽  
...  

Purpose Efficient traffic incident management is needed to alleviate the negative impact of traffic incidents. Accurate and reliable estimation of traffic incident duration is of great importance for traffic incident management. Previous studies have proposed models for traffic incident duration prediction; however, most of these studies focus on the total duration and could not update prediction results in real-time. From a traveler’s perspective, the relevant factor is the residual duration of the impact of the traffic incident. Besides, few (if any) studies have used dynamic traffic flow parameters in the prediction models. This paper aims to propose a framework to fill these gaps. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a framework based on the multi-layer perception (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) model. The proposed methodology integrates traffic incident-related factors and real-time traffic flow parameters to predict the residual traffic incident duration. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, traffic incident data and traffic flow data from Shanghai Zhonghuan Expressway are used for modeling training and testing. Findings Results show that the model with 30-min time window and taking both traffic volume and speed as inputs performed best. The area under the curve values exceed 0.85 and the prediction accuracies exceed 0.75. These indicators demonstrated that the model is appropriate for this study context. The model provides new insights into traffic incident duration prediction. Research limitations/implications The incident samples applied by this study might not be enough and the variables are not abundant. The number of injuries and casualties, more detailed description of the incident location and other variables are expected to be used to characterize the traffic incident comprehensively. The framework needs to be further validated through a sufficiently large number of variables and locations. Practical implications The framework can help reduce the impacts of incidents on the safety of efficiency of road traffic once implemented in intelligent transport system and traffic management systems in future practical applications. Originality/value This study uses two artificial neural network methods, MLP and LSTM, to establish a framework aiming at providing accurate and time-efficient information on traffic incident duration in the future for transportation operators and travelers. This study will contribute to the deployment of emergency management and urban traffic navigation planning.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruimin Li ◽  
Pan Shang

Assessing and prioritizing the duration time and effects of traffic incidents on major roads present significant challenges for road network managers. This study examines the effect of numerous factors associated with various types of incidents on their duration and proposes an incident duration prediction model. Several parametric accelerated failure time hazard-based models were examined, including Weibull, log-logistic, log-normal, and generalized gamma, as well as all models with gamma heterogeneity and flexible parametric hazard-based models with freedom ranging from one to ten, by analyzing a traffic incident dataset obtained from the Incident Reporting and Dispatching System in Beijing in 2008. Results show that different factors significantly affect different incident time phases, whose best distributions were diverse. Given the best hazard-based models of each incident time phase, the prediction result can be reasonable for most incidents. The results of this study can aid traffic incident management agencies not only in implementing strategies that would reduce incident duration, and thus reduce congestion, secondary incidents, and the associated human and economic losses, but also in effectively predicting incident duration time.


2012 ◽  
Vol 253-255 ◽  
pp. 1675-1681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Wen ◽  
Shu Yan Chen ◽  
Qin Yuan Xiong ◽  
Ru Bi Han ◽  
Shi Yu Chen

Prediction of incident duration is very important in Advanced Intelligent Traffic Incident Management and the accuracy of prediction can provide exact information for travellers. It is widely used in the area of ITS. In this paper, K-Nearest neighbor (KNN) is employed to predict the incident duration, which puts forward a new distance metric and weight determination method. This KNN model is created based on the incident data set collected by DVS-Center for Transport and Navigation, Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Management, the Netherlands. Moreover, a simulation based on Matlab is used for incident duration prediction and optimizing the best k value. Finally, an error analysis is made based on this simulation. As a result, this method (KNN) obtains high accuracy and has a better effect than Bayesian Decision Method-Based Tree Algorithm. So it can be effectively applied to intelligent traffic incident detection and clearance systems.


Transport ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi Wang ◽  
Ruimin Li ◽  
Min Guo

Predicting the duration time of incidents is important for effective real-time Traffic Incident Management (TIM). In the current study, the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm is employed as a nonparametric regression approach to develop a traffic incident duration prediction model. Incident data from 2008 on the third ring expressway mainline in Beijing are collected from the local Incident Reporting and Dispatching System. The incident sites are randomly distributed along the mainline, which is 48.3 km long and has six two-way lanes with a single-lane daily volume of more than 10000 veh. The main incident type used is sideswipe and the average incident duration time is 32.69 min. The most recent one-fourth of the incident records are selected as testing set. Vivatrat method is employed to filter anomalous data for the training set. Incident duration time is set as the dependent variable in Kruskal–Wallis test, and six attributes are identified as the main factors that affect the length of duration time, which are ‘day first shift’, ‘weekday’, ‘incident type’, ‘congestion’, ‘incident grade’ and ‘distance’. Based on the characteristics of duration time distribution, log transformation of original data is tested and proven to improve model performance. Different distance metrics and prediction algorithms are carefully investigated. Results demonstrate that the kNN model has better prediction accuracy using weighted distance metric based on decision tree and weighted prediction algorithm. The developed prediction model is further compared with other models based on the same dataset. Results show that the developed model can obtain reasonable prediction results, except for samples with extremely short or long duration. Such a prediction model can help TIM teams estimate the incident duration and implement real-time incident management strategies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 160 (5) ◽  
pp. 114-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Otto ◽  
Sven Wagner ◽  
Peter Brang

The competitive pressure of naturally regenerated European beech (Fagus sylvatica) saplings on planted pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) was investigated on two 1.8 ha permanent plots near Habsburg and Murten (Switzerland). The plots were established with the aim to test methods of artificial oak regeneration after large-scale windthrow. On both plots, 80 oaks exposed to varying levels of competitive pressure from at most 10 neighbouring beech trees were selected. The height of each oak as well as stem and branch diameters were measured. The competitive pressure was assessed using Schütz's competition index, which is based on relative tree height, crown overlap and distance from competing neighbours. Oak trees growing without or with only slight competition from beech were equally tall, while oaks exposed to moderate to strong competition were smaller. A threshold value for the competition index was found above which oak height decreased strongly. The stem and branch diameters of the oaks started to decrease even if the competition from beech was slight, and decreased much further with more competition. The oak stems started to become more slender even with only slight competition from beech. On the moderately acid beech sites studied here, beech grow taller faster than oak. Thus where beech is competing with oak and the aim is to maintain the oak, competitive pressure on the oak must be reduced at an early stage. The degree of the intervention should, however, take the individual competitive interaction into account, with more intervention if the competition is strong.


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