Vehicle Information and Communication System

Road traffic

Computer network

Floating car data

Induction loop

Traffic optimization

Engineering

Network packet

Network congestion

Network traffic control

Traffic congestion reconstruction with Kerner's three-phase theory

Traffic flow (computer networking)

Transport engineering

Traffic congestion

Computer science

Real-time computing

Telecommunications

Detector

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Urban traffic congestion has become an important issue not only affecting our daily lives, but also limiting economic development. The primary cause of urban traffic congestion is that the number of vehicles is higher than the permissible limit of the road. Previous studies have focused on dispersing traffic volume by detecting urban traffic congestion zones and predicting future trends. However, to solve the fundamental problem, it is necessary to discover the cause of traffic congestion. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a research which presents an approach to identify the causes of traffic congestion. In this paper, we propose a technique to analyze the cause of traffic congestion based on the traffic flow theory. We extract vehicle flows from traffic data, such as GPS trajectory and Vehicle Detector data. We detect vehicle flow changes utilizing the entropy from the information theory. Then, we build cumulative vehicle count curves (N-curve) that can quantify the flow of the vehicles in the traffic congestion area. The N-curves are classified into four different traffic congestion patterns by a convolutional neural network. Analyzing the causes and influence of traffic congestion is difficult and requires considerable experience and knowledge. Therefore, we present a visual analytics system that can efficiently perform a series of processes to analyze the cause and influence of traffic congestion. Through case studies, we have evaluated that our system can classify the causes of traffic congestion and can be used efficiently in road planning.

Visual Cause Analytics for Traffic Congestion