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Ruben Verborgh

Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live Open Traffic Lights data

Brecht Van de Vyvere, Karel D’Haene, Kurt D’Haene, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh

Dynamic traffic lights change their current phase duration according to the situation on the intersection, such as crowdedness. In Flanders, only the minimum and maximum duration of the current phase is published. When route planners want to reuse this data they have to predict how long the current phase will take in order to route over these traffic lights. We tested for a live Open Traffic Lights dataset of Antwerp how frequency distributions of phase durations (i) can be used to predict the duration of the current phase and (ii) can be generated client-side on-the-fly with a demonstrator. An overall mean average error (MAE) of 5.1 seconds is reached by using the median for predictions. A distribution is created for every day with time slots of 20 minutes. This result is better than expected, because phase durations can range between a few seconds and over two minutes. When taking the remaining time until phase change into account, we see a MAE around 10 seconds when the remaining time is less than a minute which we still deem valuable for route planning. Unfortunately, the MAE grows linear for phases longer than a minute making our prediction method useless when this occurs. Based on these results, we wish to present two discussion points during the workshop.

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Published in 2019 in Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{vandevyvere_sem4tra_2019,
  author = {Van de Vyvere, Brecht and D'Haene, Karel and D'Haene, Kurt and Colpaert, Pieter and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live {Open Traffic Lights} data},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport},
  year = 2019,
  month = sep,
  url = {https://brechtvdv.github.io/Article-Predicting-traffic-light-phases/},
}

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ACM
Brecht Van de Vyvere, Karel D’Haene, Kurt D’Haene, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh. 2019. Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live Open Traffic Lights data. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport.
APA
Van de Vyvere, B., D’Haene, K., D’Haene, K., Colpaert, P., & Verborgh, R. (2019, September). Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live Open Traffic Lights data. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport.
IEEE
B. Van de Vyvere, K. D’Haene, K. D’Haene, P. Colpaert, and R. Verborgh, “Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live Open Traffic Lights data,” in Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport, 2019.
LNCS
Van de Vyvere, B., D’Haene, K., D’Haene, K., Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R.: Predicting phase durations of traffic lights using live Open Traffic Lights data. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport (2019).
MLA
Van de Vyvere, Brecht, et al. “Predicting Phase Durations of Traffic Lights Using Live Open Traffic Lights Data.” Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantics for Transport, 2019.

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