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We present a simulation methodology for the prediction of ЃgunexpectedЃh bottlenecks, i.e., the bottlenecks that occur suddenly and unexpectedly for drivers on a highway. Such unexpected bottlenecks can be either a moving bottleneck (MB) caused by a slow moving vehicle or a motionless bottleneck caused by a stopped vehicle (SV). Based on simulations of a stochastic microscopic traffic flow model in the framework of KernerЃfs three-phase traffic theory, we show that through the use of a small share of probe vehicles (FCD) randomly distributed in traffic flow the reliable prediction of ЃgunexpectedЃh bottlenecks is possible. We have found that the time dependence of the probability of MB and SV prediction as well as the accuracy of the estimation of MB and SV location depend considerably on sequences of phase transitions from free flow (F) to synchronized flow (S) (F→S transition) and back from synchronized flow to free flow (S→F transition) as well as on speed oscillations in synchronized flow at the bottleneck. In the simulation approach, the identification of F→S and S→F transitions at an unexpected bottleneck has been made in accordance with Kerner's three-phase traffic theory. The presented simulation methodology allows us both the prediction of the unexpected bottleneck that suddenly occurs on a highway and the distinguishing of the origin of the unexpected bottleneck, i.e., whether the unexpected bottleneck has occurred due to a MB or a SV.

This article presents a classification of cities, taking into account their spatial planning and possible transport solutions for cities of various types. It also discusses examples of various strategies for the development of urban public transport in Russia and the European Union with a comparison of their efficiency. The article gives examples of the impact of urban planning on mobility of citizens. To implement complex strategic decisions, it is necessary to use micro and macro models which allow a comparison of situations “as is” and “as to be” to predict consequences. In addition, the authors propose a methodology to improve public transport route network and road network, which includes determining population needs in working and educational correspondences, identifying bottlenecks in the road network, developing simulation models and developing recommendations based on the simulation results, as well as the calculation of efficiency, including the calculation of a positive social effect, economic efficiency, environmental friendliness and sustainability of the urban transport system. To prove the suggested methodology, the macro and micro models of the city under study were built taking into account the spatial planning and other specifics of the city. Thus, the case study of the city of Naberezhnye Chelny shows that the use of our methodology can help to improve the situation on the roads by optimizing the bus route network and the road infrastructure. The results showed that by implementing the proposed solutions one can decrease the amount of transport load on the bottlenecks, the number of overlapping bus routes and the traffic density.

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.