Prediction of Freeway Traffic Breakdown Using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Traffic breakdown is the transition of traffic flow from an uncongested state to a congested state. During peak hours, when a large number of on-ramp vehicles merge with mainline traffic, it can cause a significant drop in speed and subsequently lead to traffic breakdown. Therefore, ramp meters have been used to regulate the traffic flow from the ramps to maintain stable traffic flow on the mainline. However, existing traffic breakdown prediction models do not consider on-ramp traffic flow. In this paper, an algorithm based on artificial neural networks (ANN) is developed to predict the probability of a traffic breakdown occurrence on freeway segments with merging traffic, considering temporal and spatial correlations of the traffic conditions from the location of interest, the ramp, and the upstream and downstream segments. The feature selection analysis reveals that the traffic condition of the ramps has a significant impact on the occurrence of traffic breakdown on the mainline. Therefore, the traffic flow characteristics of the on-ramp, along with other significant features, are used to build the ANN model. The proposed ANN algorithm can predict the occurrence of traffic breakdowns on freeway segments with merging traffic with an accuracy of 96%. Furthermore, the model has been deployed at a different location, which yields a predictive accuracy of 97%. In traffic operations, the high probability of the occurrence of a traffic breakdown can be used as a trigger for the ramp meters.