Historical data based real time prediction of vehicle arrival time

In recent times, most of the industries provide transportation facility for their employees from scheduled pick-up and drop points. In order to reduce longer waiting time, it is important to accurately predict the vehicle arrival in real time. This paper proposes a simple, lightweight yet powerful historical data based vehicle arrival time prediction model. Unlike previous work, the proposed model uses very limited input features namely vehicle trajectory and timestamp considering the scarcity and unavailability of data in the developing countries regarding traffic congestion, weather, scheduled arrival time, leg time, dwell time etc. Our proposed model is evaluated against standard Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression models using real bus data of an industry campus at Siruseri, Chennai collected over four months of time period. The result shows that proposed historical data based model can predict two and half (approx.) times faster than ANN model and two (approx.) times faster than SVM model while it also achieves a comparable accuracy (75.56%) with respect to ANN model (76%) and SVM model (71.3%). Hence, the proposed historical data based model is capable of providing a real time system by balancing the trade-off between prediction time and prediction accuracy.