Traffic and vehicle speed prediction with neural network and Hidden Markov model in vehicular networks

Accurate on-road vehicle speed prediction is important for many intelligent vehicular and transportation applications. It is also challenging because the individual vehicle speed is affected by many factors, e.g., traffic speed, vehicle type, and driver's behavior, in either deterministic or stochastic ways. This paper proposes a novel vehicle speed prediction method in the context of vehicular networks, where the real-time traffic information is accessible. Traffic speeds of following road segments are first predicted by Neural Networks (NNs) based on historical traffic data. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are trained by the Baum-Welch algorithm with historical traffic and vehicle data to present the statistical relationship between vehicle speed and traffic speed. The forward-backward algorithm is applied on HMMs to extract vehicle's speed on each road segment along the driving route. Simulation is set up on the SUMO microscopic traffic simulator with the application of a real Luxembourg highway network and traffic count data. The vehicle speed prediction result shows that our proposed method outperforms other ones in terms of prediction accuracy.