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The gradual incorporation of automated vehicles into the global transport networks leads to the need to develop tools to assess the impact of this process on various aspects of traffic. This implies a more organized movement of automated vehicles which can form uniformly moving platoons. The influence of the formation and movement of these platoons on the dynamics of traffic flow is of great interest. The currently most developed traffic flow models are based on the cellular automaton approach. They are mainly developed in the direction of increasing accuracy. This inevitably leads to the complication of models, which in their modern form have significantly moved away from the original philosophy of cellular automata, which implies simplicity and schematicity of models at the level of evolution rules, leading, however, to a complex organized behavior of the system. In the present paper, a simulation model of connected automated vehicles platoon dynamics in a heterogeneous transport system is proposed, consisting of two types of agents (vehicles): human-driven and automated. The description of the temporal evolution of the system is based on modified rules 184 and 240 for elementary cellular automata. Human-driven vehicles move according to rule 184 with the addition of accidental braking, the probability of which depends on the distance to the vehicle in front. For automated vehicles, a combination of rules is used depending on the type of nearest neighbors, regardless of the distance to them, which brings non-local interaction to the model. At the same time, it is considered that a group of sequentially moving connected automated vehicles can form an organized platoon. The influence of the ratio of types of vehicles in the system on the characteristics of the traffic flow during free movement on a circular one-lane and two-lane roads, as well as in the presence of a traffic light, is studied. The simulation results show that the effect of platoon formation is significant for a freeway traffic flow; the presence of a traffic light reduces the positive effect by about half. The movement of platoons of connected automated vehicles on two-lane roads with the possibility of lane changing was also studied. It is shown that considering the types of neighboring vehicles (automated or human-driven) when changing lanes for automated vehicles has a positive effect on the characteristics of the traffic flow.

The paper presents various modifications of the Frank–Wolfe algorithm in the equilibrium traffic assignment problem. The Beckman model is used as a model for experiments. In this article, first of all, attention is paid to the choice of the direction of the basic step of the Frank–Wolfe algorithm. Algorithms will be presented: Conjugate Frank–Wolfe (CFW), Bi-conjugate Frank–Wolfe (BFW), Fukushima Frank –Wolfe (FFW). Each modification corresponds to different approaches to the choice of this direction. Some of these modifications are described in previous works of the authors. In this article, following algorithms will be proposed: N-conjugate Frank–Wolfe (NFW), Weighted Fukushima Frank–Wolfe (WFFW). These algorithms are some ideological continuation of the BFW and FFW algorithms. Thus, if the first algorithm used at each iteration the last two directions of the previous iterations to select the next direction conjugate to them, then the proposed algorithm NFW is using more than $N$ previous directions. In the case of Fukushima Frank–Wolfe, the average of several previous directions is taken as the next direction. According to this algorithm, a modification WFFW is proposed, which uses a exponential smoothing from previous directions. For comparative analysis, experiments with various modifications were carried out on several data sets representing urban structures and taken from publicly available sources. The relative gap value was taken as the quality metric. The experimental results showed the advantage of algorithms using the previous directions for step selection over the classic Frank–Wolfe algorithm. In addition, an improvement in efficiency was revealed when using more than two conjugate directions. For example, on various datasets, the modification 3FW showed the best convergence. In addition, the proposed modification WFFW often overtook FFW and CFW, although performed worse than NFW.

The purpose of this paper is to generalize the macroscopic hydrodynamic vehicular traffic models by using the algorithm for constructing the adequate state equation — dependence the pressure from traffic density by taking into account the real experimental data (possibly using the parametric solutions for model equations). It is proved that this kind of state equation which closed model equations system and obtained from the experimentally observed form of the fundamental diagram — dependence the traffic intensity from its density, completely determines the all properties of the used phenomenological model.

Authors describe a two-stage traffic assignment model. It contains of two blocks. The first block consists of a model for calculating a correspondence (demand) matrix, whereas the second block is a traffic assignment model. The first model calculates a matrix of correspondences using a matrix of transport costs (it characterizes the required volumes of movement from one area to another, it is time in this case). To solve this problem, authors propose to use one of the most popular methods of calculating the correspondence matrix in urban studies — the entropy model. The second model describes exactly how the needs for displacement specified by the correspondence matrix are distributed along the possible paths. Knowing the ways of the flows distribution along the paths, it is possible to calculate the cost matrix. Equilibrium in a two-stage model is a fixed point in the sequence of these two models. In practice the problem of finding a fixed point can be solved by the fixed-point iteration method. Unfortunately, at the moment the issue of convergence and estimations of the convergence rate for this method has not been studied quite thoroughly. In addition, the numerical implementation of the algorithm results in many problems. In particular, if the starting point is incorrect, situations may arise where the algorithm requires extremely large numbers to be computed and exceeds the available memory even on the most modern computers. Therefore the article proposes a method for reducing the problem of finding the equilibrium to the problem of the convex non-smooth optimization. Also a numerical method for solving the obtained optimization problem is proposed. Numerical experiments were carried out for both methods of solving the problem. The authors used data for Vladivostok (for this city information from various sources was processed and collected in a new dataset) and two smaller cities in the USA. It was not possible to achieve convergence by the method of fixed-point iteration, whereas the second model for the same dataset demonstrated convergence rate $k^{-1.67}$.

We consider one of the problems of transport modelling — searching the equilibrium distribution of traffic flows in the network. We use the classic Beckman’s model to describe time costs and flow distribution in the network represented by directed graph. Meanwhile agents’ behavior is not completely rational, what is described by the introduction of Markov logit dynamics: any driver selects a route randomly according to the Gibbs’ distribution taking into account current time costs on the edges of the graph. Thus, the problem is reduced to searching of the stationary distribution for this dynamics which is a stochastic Nash – Wardrope equilibrium in the corresponding population congestion game in the transport network. Since the game is potential, this problem is equivalent to the problem of minimization of some functional over flows distribution. The stochasticity is reflected in the appearance of the entropy regularization, in contrast to non-stochastic case. The dual problem is constructed to obtain a solution of the optimization problem. The universal primal-dual gradient method is applied. A major specificity of this method lies in an adaptive adjustment to the local smoothness of the problem, what is most important in case of the complex structure of the objective function and an inability to obtain a prior smoothness bound with acceptable accuracy. Such a situation occurs in the considered problem since the properties of the function strongly depend on the transport graph, on which we do not impose strong restrictions. The article describes the algorithm including the numerical differentiation for calculation of the objective function value and gradient. In addition, the paper represents a theoretical estimate of time complexity of the algorithm and the results of numerical experiments conducted on a small American town.

Automated urban traffic monitoring systems are widely used to solve various tasks in intelligent transport systems of different regions. They include video enforcement, video surveillance, traffic management system, etc. Effective traffic management and rapid response to traffic incidents require continuous monitoring and analysis of information from these complexes, as well as time series forecasting for further anomaly detection in traffic flow. To increase the forecasting quality, data fusion from different sources is needed. It will reduce the forecasting error, related to possible incorrect values and data gaps. We implemented the approach for short-term and middle-term forecasting of traffic flow (5, 10, 15 min) based on data fusion from video enforcement and video surveillance systems. We made forecasting using different recurrent neural network architectures: LSTM, GRU, and bidirectional LSTM with one and two layers. We investigated the forecasting quality of bidirectional LSTM with 64 and 128 neurons in hidden layers. The input window size (1, 4, 12, 24, 48) was investigated. The RMSE value was used as a forecasting error. We got minimum RMSE = 0.032405 for basic LSTM with 64 neurons in the hidden layer and window size = 24.

The short-term prediction of road traffic condition is one of the main tasks of transportation modelling. The main purpose of which are traffic control, reporting of accidents, avoiding traffic jams due to knowledge of traffic flow and subsequent transportation planning. A number of solutions exist — both model-driven and data driven had proven to be successful in capturing the dynamics of traffic flow. Nevertheless, most space-time models suffer from high mathematical complexity and low efficiency. Artificial Neural Networks, one of the prominent datadriven approaches, show promising performance in modelling the complexity of traffic flow. We present a neural network architecture for traffic flow prediction on a real-world road network graph. The model is based on the combination of a recurrent neural network and graph convolutional neural network. Where a recurrent neural network is used to model temporal dependencies, and a convolutional neural network is responsible for extracting spatial features from traffic. To make multiple few steps ahead predictions, the encoder-decoder architecture is used, which allows to reduce noise propagation due to inexact predictions. To model the complexity of traffic flow, we employ multilayered architecture. Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. To speed up the training process, we use skip-connections between each layer, so that each layer teaches only the residual function with respect to the previous layer outputs. The resulting neural network was trained on raw data from traffic flow detectors from the US highway system with a resolution of 5 minutes. 3 metrics: mean absolute error, mean relative error, mean-square error were used to estimate the quality of the prediction. It was found that for all metrics the proposed model achieved lower prediction error than previously published models, such as Vector Auto Regression, LSTM and Graph Convolution GRU.

Since 1950s the field of city transport modelling has progressed rapidly. The first equilibrium distribution models of traffic flow appeared. The most popular model (which is still being widely used) was the Beckmann model, based on the two Wardrop principles. The core of the model could be briefly described as the search for the Nash equilibrium in a population demand game, in which losses of agents (drivers) are calculated based on the chosen path and demands of this path with correspondences being fixed. The demands (costs) of a path are calculated as the sum of the demands of different path segments (graph edges), that are included in the path. The costs of an edge (edge travel time) are determined by the amount of traffic on this edge (more traffic means larger travel time). The flow on a graph edge is determined by the sum of flows over all paths passing through the given edge. Thus, the cost of traveling along a path is determined not only by the choice of the path, but also by the paths other drivers have chosen. Thus, it is a standard game theory task. The way cost functions are constructed allows us to narrow the search for equilibrium to solving an optimization problem (game is potential in this case). If the cost functions are monotone and non-decreasing, the optimization problem is convex. Actually, different assumptions about the cost functions form different models. The most popular model is based on the BPR cost function. Such functions are massively used in calculations of real cities. However, in the beginning of the XXI century, Yu. E. Nesterov and A. de Palma showed that Beckmann-type models have serious weak points. Those could be fixed using the stable dynamics model, as it was called by the authors. The search for equilibrium here could be also reduced to an optimization problem, moreover, the problem of linear programming. In 2013, A.V.Gasnikov discovered that the stable dynamics model can be obtained by a passage to the limit in the Beckmann model. However, it was made only for several practically important, but still special cases. Generally, the question if this passage to the limit is possible remains open. In this paper, we provide the justification of the possibility of the above-mentioned passage to the limit in the general case, when the cost function for traveling along the edge as a function of the flow along the edge degenerates into a function equal to fixed costs until the capacity is reached and it is equal to plus infinity when the capacity is exceeded.

This article describes possible improvements for the simultaneous multi-stage transport model code for speeding up computations and improving the model detailing. The model consists of two blocks, where the first block is intended to calculate the correspondence matrix, and the second block computes the equilibrium distribution of traffic flows along the routes. The first block uses a matrix of transport costs that calculates a matrix of correspondences. It describes the costs (time in our case) of travel from one area to another. The second block presents how exactly the drivers (agents) are distributed along the possible paths. So, knowing the distribution of the flows along the paths, it is possible to calculate the cost matrix. Equilibrium in a two-stage traffic flow model is a fixed point of a sequence of the two described models. Thus, in this paper we report an attempt to influence the calculation speed of Dijkstra’s algorithm part of the model. It is used to calculate the shortest path from one point to another, which should be re-calculated after each iteration of the flow distribution part. We also study and implement the road pricing in the model code, as well as we replace the Sinkhorn algorithm in the calculation of the correspondence matrix part with its faster implementation. In the beginning of the paper, we provide a short theoretical overview of the transport modelling motivation; we discuss current approaches to the modelling and provide an example for demonstration of how the whole cycle of multi-stage transport modelling works.

The problem of optimal control of traffic flow in an urban road network is considered. The control is carried out by varying the duration of the working phases of traffic lights at controlled intersections. A description of the control system developed is given. The control system enables the use of three types of control: open-loop, feedback and manual. In feedback control, road infrastructure detectors, video cameras, inductive loop and radar detectors are used to determine the quantitative characteristics of current traffic flow state. The quantitative characteristics of the traffic flows are fed into a mathematical model of the traffic flow, implemented in the computer environment of an automatic traffic flow control system, in order to determine the moments for switching the working phases of the traffic lights. The model is a system of finite-difference recurrent equations and describes the change in traffic flow on each road section at each time step, based on retrived data on traffic flow characteristics in the network, capacity of maneuvers and flow distribution through alternative maneuvers at intersections. The model has scaling and aggregation properties. The structure of the model depends on the structure of the graph of the controlled road network. The number of nodes in the graph is equal to the number of road sections in the considered network. The simulation of traffic flow changes in real time makes it possible to optimally determine the duration of traffic light operating phases and to provide traffic flow control with feedback based on its current state. The system of automatic collection and processing of input data for the model is presented. In order to model the states of traffic flow in the network and to solve the problem of optimal traffic flow control, the CTraf software package has been developed, a brief description of which is given in the paper. An example of the solution of the optimal control problem of traffic flows on the basis of real data in the road network of Moscow is given.