LAUSR

Lane-level traffic state prediction is one of the most essential issues in the connected automated vehicle highway systems. Accurate and timely traffic state prediction of the lane sections can assist the connected automated vehicles in planning the optimal route and making lane selection. In this article, we tackle the problem of forecasting lane-level short-term traffic speed and propose a novel mixed deep learning (MDL) model by coordinating the convolutional long short-term memory (Conv-LSTM) layers, convolutional layers, and a dense layer in an end-to-end structure. The introduction of the Conv-LSTM neural network enables the proposed MDL model to better capture the spatio-temporal characteristics and correlations of the dynamic lane-based traffic flow synchronously. To improve the efficiency of the proposed model, a feature correlation analysis method based on the maximum information coefficient is presented to measure the relevance between the historical traffic flows and the traffic speeds to be forecasted. Validated by the ground-truth traffic flow data collected by the remote traffic microwave sensors installed on the expressways in Beijing, the MDL model is capable of capturing the fluctuation of the lane-level traffic speeds at different types of lanes effectively during the whole day. Furthermore, the results confirm that the MDL model achieves better predictive performance than several state-of-the-art benchmark models in terms of prediction accuracy and space-time distributions. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/lwqs93/MDL.