Patil, Mayur (The Ohio State University), Ahmed, Qadeer (Ohio State University), Midlam-Mohler, Shawn (Ohio State University)

Urban Traffic Forecasting with Integrated Travel Time and Data Availability in a Conformal Graph Neural Network Framework

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Traffic prediction and estimation IV" (ThBT7), Thursday, September 26, 2024, 14:30−14:50, Salon 15

2024 IEEE 27th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), September 24- 27, 2024, Edmonton, Canada

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 8, 2024

Abstract

Traffic flow prediction is a big challenge for transportation authorities as it helps plan and develop better infrastructure. State-of-the-art models often struggle to consider the data in the best way possible, as well as intrinsic uncertainties and the actual physics of the traffic. In this study, we propose a novel framework to incorporate travel times between stations into a weighted adjacency matrix of a Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture with information from traffic stations based on their data availability. To handle uncertainty, we utilized the Adaptive Conformal Prediction (ACP) method that adjusts prediction intervals based on real-time validation residuals. To validate our results, we model a microscopic traffic scenario and perform a Monte-Carlo simulation to get a travel time distribution for a Vehicle Under Test (VUT), and this distribution is compared against the real-world data. Experiments show that the proposed model outperformed the next best model by approximately 24% in MAE and 8% in RMSE and validation showed the simulated travel time closely matches the 95th percentile of the observed travel time value.