Characterizing highway traffic dynamics using GMM and phase transition analysis

Characteristic analysis of dynamical traffic flow is an important issue in traffic management and control systems. Especially for a dense-ramps highway system within urban area, there exists a highly nonlinear and sophisticated property of traffic flow dynamics. This paper proposes a Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) to estimate dynamical traffic flow. The traffic flow data can be represented by a linear combination of multiple Gaussian functions to reduce the large amount of traffic data. Then the phase transition approach is adopted for analyzing various traffic flow characteristics. With the phase transition analysis, the dynamical switching behaviors of traffic flow can be characterized. The experimental results shown that the five types of traffic flow patterns are identified based on a real traffic dataset from Taiwan highway systems. Each traffic flow pattern can indicate a different interpretation of a special dynamical traffic behavior.