Data-Driven Detection of Anomalies and Cascading Failures in Traffic Networks

Abstract

Traffic networks are one of the most critical infrastructures for any community. The increasing integration of smart and connected sensors in traffic networks provides researchers with unique opportunities to study the dynamics of this critical community infrastructure. Our focus in this paper is on the failure dynamics of traffic networks. We are specifically interested in analyzing the cascade effects of traffic congestions caused by physical incidents, focusing on developing mechanisms to isolate and identify the source of a congestion. To analyze failure propagation, it is crucial to develop (a) monitors that can identify an anomaly and (b) a model to capture the dynamics of anomaly propagation. In this paper, we use real traffic data from Nashville, TN to demonstrate a novel anomaly detector and a Timed Failure Propagation Graph based diagnostics mechanism. Our novelty lies in the ability to capture the the spatial  information and the interconnections of the traffic network as well as the use of recurrent neural network architectures to learn and predict the operation of a graph edge as a function of its immediate peers, including both incoming and outgoing branches. To study physical traffic incidents, we augment the real data with simulated data generated using SUMO, a microscopic traffic simulator. Our results show that we are able to build LSTM-based traffic-speed predictors with an average loss of 6.55 × 10^−4 compared to Gaussian Process Regression based predictors with an average loss of 1.78 × 10^−2. We are also able to detect anomalies with high precision and recall, resulting in an AUC of 0.8507 for the precision-recall curve. Finally, formulating the cascade propagation problem as a Timed Failure Propagation Graph, we are able to identify the source of a failure accurately.