Short Term Traffic Flow Prediction for a Non Urban Highway Using Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

This study applies Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for short term prediction of traffic flow using past traffic data. The model incorporates traffic volume, speed, density, time and day of week as input variables. Speed of each category of vehicles was considered separately as input variables in contrast to previous studies reported in literature which consider average speed of combined traffic flow. Results show that Artificial Neural Network has consistent performance even if time interval for traffic flow prediction was increased from 5 minutes to 15 minutes and produced good results even though speeds of each category of vehicles were considered separately as input variables.