Congestion prediction with big data for real-time highway traffic

By collecting and analyzing a vast quantity and different categories of information, traffic flow and road congestion can be predicted and avoided in intelligent transportation system. However, how to tackle with these big data is vital but challenging. Most of the existing literatures utilized batch method to process a bunch of road data that cannot achieve real-time traffic prediction. In this paper, we use the spouts and bolts in Apache Storm to implement a real-time traffic prediction model by analyzing enormous streaming data, such as road density, traffic events, and rainfall volume. The proposed SVM-based real-time highway traffic congestion prediction (SRHTCP) model collects the road data from the Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau, the traffic events reported by road users from the Police Broadcasting Service in Taiwan, and the weather data from the Central Weather Bureau in Taiwan. We use fuzzy theory to evaluate the traffic level of road section in real time with considering road speed, road density, road traffic volume, and the rainfall of road sections. In addition, the SRHTCP model predicts the road speed of next time period by exploring streaming traffic and weather data. Results showed that the proposed SRHTCP model improves 25.6% prediction accuracy than the prediction method based on weighted exponential moving average method under the measurement of mean absolute relative error.