Urban traffic congestion estimation and prediction based on floating car trajectory data

• Floating car trajectory data can be used to predict traffic congestion effectively.
• A Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation method with dynamic adaptive weight is introduced.
• A Traffic Flow Prediction method utilizing particle swarm optimization is proposed.
• Experiments verify methods’ performances in accuracy, instantaneity and stability.

Traffic flow prediction is an important precondition to alleviate traffic congestion in large-scale urban areas. Recently, some estimation and prediction methods have been proposed to predict the traffic congestion with respect to different metrics such as accuracy, instantaneity and stability. Nevertheless, there is a lack of unified method to address the three performance aspects systematically. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate and predict the urban traffic congestion using floating car trajectory data efficiently. In this method, floating cars are regarded as mobile sensors, which can probe a large scale of urban traffic flows in real time. In order to estimate the traffic congestion, we make use of a new fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method in which the weights of multi-indexes are assigned according to the traffic flows. To predict the traffic congestion, an innovative traffic flow prediction method using particle swarm optimization algorithm is responsible for calculating the traffic flow parameters. Then, a congestion state fuzzy division module is applied to convert the predicted flow parameters to citizens’ cognitive congestion state. Experimental results show that our proposed method has advantage in terms of accuracy, instantaneity and stability.