Digital Twin Empowered Model Free Prediction of Accident-Induced Congestion in Urban Road Networks
Xingyi Ji, Wenwei Yue, Changle Li, Yue Chen, Nan Xue, Zifan Sha
Abstract
The occurrence of traffic accidents in cities is often accompanied by property losses, environmental pollution, casualties, and congestion. Predicting the spatio-temporal range of accident-induced congestion can mitigate the negative effects by taking appropriate measures to respond to traffic accidents in a timely manner. Unlike most existing traffic accident spatial-temporal prediction strategies that depend on existing traffic models, this paper proposes a model-free method by using the macroscopic road network images, which relieves the restriction of precise modeling of traffic dynamics and the detailed traffic data. Specifically, we first design a digital twin road network to observe the traffic operation from a macro perspective. Then, after designing the structure of the Convolutional LSTM (Conv-LSTM) cell, we stack multiple Conv-LSTM layers to form an encoding-decoding structure to predict spatio-temporal congestion caused by accidents in urban road networks. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the proposed method improves the prediction accuracy compared with the model-based method and the LSTM network model. The proposed strategy provides a new approach to predict the spatio-temporal congestion caused by accidents from a macroscopic perspective.