Machine Learning Approach to Forecast Work Zone Mobility using Probe Vehicle Data

The aim of deploying intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is often to help engineers and operators identify traffic congestion. The future of ITS-based traffic management is the prediction of traffic conditions using ubiquitous data sources. There are currently well-developed prediction models for recurrent traffic congestion such as during peak hour. However, there is a need to predict traffic congestion resulting from non-recurring events such as highway lane closures. As agencies begin to understand the value of collecting work zone data, rich data sets will emerge consisting of historical work zone information. In the era of big data, rich mobility data sources are becoming available that enable the application of machine learning to predict mobility for work zones. The purpose of this study is to utilize historical lane closure information with supervised machine learning algorithms to forecast spatio-temporal mobility for future lane closures. Various traffic data sources were collected from 1,160 work zones on Michigan interstates between 2014 and 2017. This study uses probe vehicle data to retrieve a mobility profile for these historical observations, and uses these profiles to apply random forest, XGBoost, and artificial neural network (ANN) classification algorithms. The mobility prediction results showed that the ANN model outperformed the other models by reaching up to 85% accuracy. The objective of this research was to show that machine learning algorithms can be used to capture patterns for non-recurrent traffic congestion even when hourly traffic volume is not available.