Relieving the Congestion around a School via Automatic Vehicle Identification Technology-Based Traffic Measures

Recently, many parents drive their children to and from schools, leading to serious road congestion around the school gate. The school-related congestion is a special type of congestion caused by periodic impulsive aggregation of specific travellers for certain events. In this study, the individual long short-term traffic behaviours were reconstructed based on automatic vehicle identification (AVI) technologies. The cause and countermeasure of congestion around the service centers were identified through the individual behavioural properties. The vehicles that were primarily responsible for periodic impulsive aggregation congestion (PIAC) around the school gate were precisely targeted via a proposed vehicle grading clustering framework. The road management objectives were updated in the AVI data environment and it was found that only 3%–5% of the total number of vehicles passing by the school gate require specific management such as traffic enforcement activities. A series of traffic measures were formulated based on the results of vehicle grading clustering and achieved positive effects in a periodic impulsive aggregation area. It is an effective way to solve the PIAC by formulating management with different activity levels and resolutions for specific travellers. The methodologies and experience presented in this study may provide a useful tool for relieving such special type of congestion around other service centers faced with similar scenarios.

Route Choice Behaviour Modeling using IoT Integrated Artificial Intelligence

Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) data is used to identify the location of a particular vehicle in and can also be used for route choice behaviour modelling. But the use of AVI doesn’t provide accurate information on OD pair and the particular route that is chosen. This problem is addressed in this paper using a semi-supervised learning method which can be used to identify the route on prior training. As the first step, the AVI trace is segregated into observation pairs using the Maximum Likelihood Estimation and then it is further joined with GPS co-ordinates to tackle the sparse issues. As the next step, the heterogeneity and correlation between the various pairs are determined using Mixed Logit model. As the final step, a relationship between the likelihood function and route choice model is established using Maximum to log-likelihood function. Based on the observations, the results are recorded and the proposed work shows significant improvement in the accuracy in route determination. The evaluation scenario shows that the proposed work could be expanded to a larger area. Moreover, the robustness of the system is illustrated using sensitivity analysis. This work uses AVI data with respect to its behaviour in routes through high penetration.

Dynamic Path Flow Estimation Using Automatic Vehicle Identification and Probe Vehicle Trajectory Data: A 3D Convolutional Neural Network Model

Dynamic path flows, referring to the number of vehicles that choose each path in a network over time, are generally estimated with the partial observations as the input. The automatic vehicle identification (AVI) system and probe vehicle trajectories are now popular and can provide rich and complementary trip information, but the data fusion was rarely explored. Therefore, in this paper, the dynamic path flow estimation is based on these two data sources and transformed into a feature learning problem. To fuse the two data sources belonging to different detection ways at the data level, the virtual AVI points, analogous to the real AVI points (turning movements at nodes with AVI detectors), are defined and selected to statically observe the dynamic movement of the probe vehicles. The corresponding selection principles and a programming model considering the distribution of real AVI points are first established. The selected virtual AVI points are used to construct the input tensor, and the turning movement-based observations from both the data sources can be extracted and fused. Then, a three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model is designed to exploit the hidden patterns from the tensor and establish the high-dimensional correlations with path flows. As the path flow labels commonly with noises, the bootstrapping method is adopted for model training and the corresponding relabeling principle is defined to purify the noisy labels. The entire model is extensively tested based on a realistic road network, and the results show that the designed CNN model with the presented data fusion method can perform well in training time and estimation accuracy. The robustness of a model to noisy labels is also improved through the bootstrapping method. The dynamic path flows estimated by the trained model can be applied to travel information provision, proactive route guidance, and signal control with high real-time requirements.

A Low-Cost Automatic Vehicle Identification Sensor for Traffic Networks Analysis

In recent years, different techniques to address the problem of observability in traffic networks have been proposed in multiple research projects, being the technique based on the installation of automatic vehicle identification sensors (AVI), one of the most successful in terms of theoretical results, but complex in terms of its practical application to real studies. Indeed, a very limited number of studies consider the possibility of installing a series of non-definitive plate scanning sensors in the elements of a network, which allow technicians to obtain a better conclusions when they deal with traffic network analysis such as urbans mobility plans that involve the estimation of traffic flows for different scenarios. With these antecedents, the contributions of this paper are (1) an architecture to deploy low-cost sensors network able to be temporarily installed on the city streets as an alternative of rubber hoses commonly used in the elaboration of urban mobility plans; (2) a design of the low-cost, low energy sensor itself, and (3) a sensor location model able to establish the best set of links of a network given both the study objectives and of the sensor needs of installation. A case of study with the installation of as set of proposed devices is presented, to demonstrate its viability.