A Graph Deep Learning-Based Fast Traffic Flow Prediction Method in Urban Road Networks

In modern smart cities, road networks are becoming more and more complicated, resulting in more complex format of graphs. This brings many challenges to the forecasting of traffic flow in road graphs. Most of traditional traffic flow forecasting methods ignored many implicit relationships inside road graphs. And this cannot be well suitable for modern road networks in smart cities. Besides, the operation of smart cities is accompanied with real-time big data stream. The running efficiency of forecasting methods is another important concern. To handle this issue, this paper proposes a graph deep learning-based fast traffic flow forecasting method in urban road networks. Firstly, the theory about graph convolution operations is deduced and can be used as the basis of a graph convolution network (GCN). Then, the whole road network is viewed as a complex road graph, and the GCN is introduced to establish a novel forecasting method for graph-level traffic flow. With roads being regarded as nodes and their relations being regarded as edges, graph-level forecasting can be realized with the use of the proposed method. Experiments are carried out on a standard real dataset to evaluate the proposal. The experimental results show a proper performance of the proposal.