Predicting Travel Times for the South Jersey Real-Time Motorist Information System

A dynamic travel-time prediction model was developed for the South Jersey (southern New Jersey) motorist real-time information system. During development and evaluation of the model, the integration of traffic flow theory, measurement and application of collected data, and traffic simulation were considered. Reliable prediction results can be generated with limited historical real-time traffic data. In the study, acoustic sensors were installed at potential congested places to monitor traffic congestion. A developed simulation model was calibrated with the data collected from the sensors, and this was applied to emulate traffic operations and evaluate the proposed prediction model under time-varying traffic conditions. With emulated real–time information (travel times) generated by the simulation model, an algorithm based on Kalman filtering was developed and applied to forecast travel times for specific origin-destination pairs over different periods. Prediction accuracy was evaluated by the simulation model. Results show that the developed travel-time predictive model demonstrates satisfactory performance.