Robust Estimation of Traffic Arrival Rates at Signalized Intersections With Sparse Internet of Vehicles

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

The development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) offers significant opportunities to enhance the traffic management system based on connected vehicles (CVs), while accurate traffic arrival rate estimation is critical for the dynamic evaluation and optimization of signalized intersections. Existing CV-based methods, however, are constrained to single-stream estimation that assumes first-in-first-out (FIFO) discipline, overlook initial queues, and deteriorate sharply when CV penetration is low or data are spoofed. To address these limitations, this study proposes a joint maximum a posteriori (JO-MAP) method that jointly estimates cycle-based arrival rates of multiple traffic streams under both undersaturated and oversaturated conditions. The key innovations include a joint weighted likelihood function that treats each queued CV as an independent observation, eliminates FIFO assumptions, and explicitly accounts for the initial queues, and a joint Bayesian prior that embeds historical CV sample-size information for enhanced accuracy even with sparse real-time CV data. Comprehensive simulation and field experiments show that JO-MAP produces reliable estimates under different penetration rates, arrival patterns, and traffic volume levels, achieving 100% estimation success and less-than 4 veh cycle-level error with only 5% CV penetration. The feature of joint estimation makes the method less demanding for the penetration rate of CVs and more robust to noisy/spoofing data compared to baseline methods, limiting the error increase to 1.2 veh under deliberate spoofing attacks. Besides, JO-MAP reduces average vehicle delay by 12%-20% when integrated into adaptive signal control, demonstrating its potential for IoV-enabled traffic management.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)40146-40158
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE internet of things journal
Volume12
Issue number19
Early online date15 Jul 2025
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Mendeley d025f01b-31ba-3579-8b49-eb8a9688c03a
Scopus 105012277941
WOS 001579054000046

Keywords

Keywords

  • Accuracy, Arrival rate estimation, Bayes methods, Estimation, Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Maximum likelihood estimation, Noise measurement, Queueing analysis, Streams, Tensors, Volume measurement, connected vehicles (CVs), maximum a posteriori (MAP), Robust joint estimation