Modelling and Data Fusion of Dynamic Highway Traffic

This paper presents a data fusion framework for processing and integrating data collected from heterogeneous sources on motorways to generate short-term predictions. Considering the heterogeneity in spatiotemporal granularity in data from different sources, an adaptive kernel-based smoothing method was first used to project all data onto a common space–time grid. The data were then integrated through a Kalman filter framework build based on the cell transmission model for generating short-term traffic state prediction. The algorithms were applied and tested with real traffic data collected from the California I-880 corridor in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Mobile Century experiment. Results revealed that the proposed fusion algorithm can work with data sources that are different in their spatiotemporal granularity and improve the accuracy of state estimation through incorporating multiple data sources. The present work contributed to the field of traffic engineering and management with the application of big data analytics.