Plenary Lecture
An Integrated Method for Short-Term Prediction of Road Traffic Conditions for Intelligent Transportation Systems Applications
Associate Professor Gaetano Fusco
Dipartimento Ingegneria Civile, Edile ed Ambientale
Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Italy
E-mail: gaetano.fusco@uniroma1.it
Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) integrate ICT technologies with transportation engineering in order to enhance the knowledge of users and operators on the transportation system state and, possibly, enable them reacting promptly to changes of external conditions and keep the system close to a desired state.
Reliable and fast methods for estimating the current state of traffic and predict short-term future conditions are crucial for effective ITS.
Road traffic is affected by usual random fluctuations as well as by unexpected perturbations like accidents, unexpected temporary capacity reductions or demand increases. Usual performance fluctuations can be predicted quickly and effectively by mathematical functions that do no model traffic explicitly, such as time series analysis, filtering techniques and time dependent Artificial Neural Networks. However, prediction of traffic conditions in case of anomalies needs explicit traffic models.
An integrated method will be presented for short-term traffic prediction that integrates an Artificial Neural Network predictor that forecasts future states in standard conditions, an anomaly detection module that exploits floating car data to individuate possible occurrences of anomalous traffic conditions, and a macroscopic traffic model that predicts speeds and queue progressions in case of anomalies.
Results of offline applications on a primary Italian motorway will be presented.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Gaetano Fusco is Associate Professor of Transportation at the Faculty of Engineering of Sapienza University of Roma and scientific expert of the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
His research interests, although they cover many aspects of the transport system engineering, are mainly addressed to study advanced methods for transport system management (usually denoted as "Intelligent Transportation Systems") and specifically focused to traveler information systems, road traffic control and network design of logistic systems.