Traffic peak is an important parameter of modern transport systems. It can be used to calculate the indices of road congestion, which has become a common problem worldwide. With accurate information about traffic peaks, transportation administrators can make better decisions to optimize the traffic networks and therefore enhance the performance of transportation systems. We present a traffic peak detection method, which constructs the Voronoi diagram of the input traffic flow data and computes the prominence of candidate peak points using the diagram. Salient peaks are selected based on the prominence. The algorithm takes O(n log n) time and linear space, where n is the size of the input time series. As compared with the existing algorithms, our approach works directly on noisy data and detects salient peaks without a smoothing prestep and thus avoids the dilemma in choosing an appropriate smoothing scale and prevents the occurrence of removing/degrading real peaks during smoothing step. The prominence of candidate peaks offers the subsequent analysis the flexibility to choose peaks at any scale. Experiments illustrated that the proposed method outperforms the existing smoothing-based methods in sensitivity, positive predictivity, and accuracy.
Detection and Optimization of Traffic Networks Based on Voronoi Diagram
