Utilizing Artificial Neural Network in GPS-Equipped Probe Vehicles Data- Based Travel Time Estimation

Real-time traffic status information provides good references for urban traffic control and management. Travel time is easy to understand and widely employed in representing traffic status. With significantly improved positioning accuracy and coverage, trajectory data collected from GPS-equipped probe vehicles have great potential for traffic state recognition. This paper presents a machine learning enabled travel time estimation method based on the GPS-equipped probe vehicles data. This research considers the spatial-temporal relevancy while solving the travel time allocation problem: the travel time of target segment might be associated with its previous travel times and/or the traffic states of nearby relevant segments. After data normalization and network clustering, an artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm considering such spatial-temporal relevancy was conducted to infer the travel time distribution among the traveled segments within one path. Furthermore, a weighted summation of the travel time estimation result from various trajectories was calculated to better represent the segment travel time in one time step. The proposed method was evaluated by evaluating the estimation results with automatic vehicle identification obtained ground truth. The experimental results illustrated that by utilizing the ANN to consider the spatial-temporal relevancy, the proposed method is effective and efficient in estimating the travel time.