Road traffic density estimation and congestion detection with a hybrid observer-based strategy

Reliable detection of traffic congestion provides pertinent information for improving safety and comfort by alerting the driver to crowded roads or providing useful information for rapid decision-making. This paper addresses the problem of road traffic congestion estimation and detection from a statistical approach. First, a piecewise switched linear traffic model (PWSL)-based observer is introduced. The proposed hybrid observer (HO) estimates the unmeasured traffic density, thus reducing the cost of implementing and maintenance sensors and measurements devices. Here, the observer gains of each mode are obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Second, a novel method for efficiently monitoring traffic congestion is proposed by combining the proposed HO with a generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) test. Also, an exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA) filter is applied to the residual data to reduce high-frequency noise. Thus, as the EWMA filter, aggregates all of the information from past and actual samples in the decision rule, it extends the congestion detection abilities of the GLR test to the detection of incipient changes. This study shows that a better performance is achieved when GLR is applied to filtered data than to unfiltered data. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified on traffic data from the four-lane State Route 60 (SR-60) and the three lanes Interstate 210 (I-210) in California freeways. Results show the efficacy of the proposed HO-based EWMA-GLR method to monitor traffic congestions. Also, the proposed approach is compared to that of the conventional Shewhart and EWMA approaches and found better performance.