Machine Learning-Driven Calibration of Traffic Models Based on a Real-Time Video Analysis

Accurate traffic simulation models play a crucial role in developing intelligent transport systems that offer timely traffic information to users and efficient traffic management. However, calibrating these models to represent real-world traffic conditions accurately poses a significant challenge due to the dynamic nature of traffic flow and the limitations of traditional calibration methods. This article introduces a machine learning-based approach to calibrate macroscopic traffic simulation models using real-time traffic video stream data. The proposed method for creating and calibrating a traffic simulation model has significantly improved the statistical correspondence between the generated vehicle characteristics and real data about cars on the simulated road section. The correspondence has increased from 37% to 73%. Machine learning models trained on generated data and tested on real data show improved accuracy rates. Mean absolute error, mean square error, and mean absolute percentage error decreased by more than two orders of magnitude. The coefficient of determination has also increased, approaching 1. This method eliminates the need to deploy wireless sensor networks, which can reduce the cost of implementing intelligent transport systems.