Research on campus traffic congestion detection using BP neural network and Markov model

The automatic congestion detection of campus traffic presents a significant challenge to the traffic congestion research community. Typically, campus road users can be classified into four types including pedestrian, bike, vehicle and motorbike, which enhances the complexity of traffic condition. Thus, existing descriptors of traffic congestion for highway traffic are not valid when describing the traffic congestion in campus. In this paper, we propose a novel descriptor, road occupancy rate, for measuring campus traffic congestion level, which is statistically proved to be the most effective descriptor among other descriptors (including speed of pedestrian, vehicle, motorbike and bike). Two existing models - Markov model and back propagation neural network (BPNN) - are introduced in this paper to detect the campus traffic congestion combined with the proposed descriptors. And three phases are defined based on three-phase traffic theory to describe the campus traffic congestion levels. Experimental results indicate that the proposed detecting methods are both capable of detecting campus traffic congestion, while the BPNN-based method achieves higher accuracy and more stable performance.