Title
Visual Cause Analytics for Traffic Congestion
Abstract
Urban traffic congestion has become an important issue not only affecting our daily lives, but also limiting economic development. The primary cause of urban traffic congestion is that the number of vehicles is higher than the permissible limit of the road. Previous studies have focused on dispersing traffic volume by detecting urban traffic congestion zones and predicting future trends. However, to solve the fundamental problem, it is necessary to discover the cause of traffic congestion. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a research which presents an approach to identify the causes of traffic congestion. In this paper, we propose a technique to analyze the cause of traffic congestion based on the traffic flow theory. We extract vehicle flows from traffic data, such as GPS trajectory and Vehicle Detector data. We detect vehicle flow changes utilizing the entropy from the information theory. Then, we build cumulative vehicle count curves (N-curve) that can quantify the flow of the vehicles in the traffic congestion area. The N-curves are classified into four different traffic congestion patterns by a convolutional neural network. Analyzing the causes and influence of traffic congestion is difficult and requires considerable experience and knowledge. Therefore, we present a visual analytics system that can efficiently perform a series of processes to analyze the cause and influence of traffic congestion. Through case studies, we have evaluated that our system can classify the causes of traffic congestion and can be used efficiently in road planning.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TVCG.2019.2940580
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Causes of traffic congestion,traffic flow theory,information entropy,convolutional neural network,visual analytics
Journal
27
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1077-2626
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
20
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mingyu Pi140.70
Hanbyul Yeon2113.49
Hyesook Son341.71
Yun Jang430225.63