An Attention-Based Digraph Convolution Network Enabled Framework for Congestion Recognition in Three-Dimensional Road Networks

Congestion recognition is necessary for vehicle routing, traffic control, and many other applications in intelligent transportation systems. Besides, traffic facilities in the three-dimensional road network, which contains the fundamental spatiotemporal features for congestion recognition, provides multi-source traffic information. To exploit these traffic big data, in this paper, we propose an attention mechanism-based digraph convolution network (ADGCN) enabled framework to tackle the congestion recognition problem. It can be divided into two parts, spatial relevance modeling and temporal relevance modeling. At first, the representation incorporates spatiotemporal traffic information with the three-dimensional urban network, and partially decouples the global network topology to a single-knot digraph. Then a digraph-based convolution network is used to capture high-order spatial features. Finally, to proceed with time-series features, the multi-modal attention mechanism is introduced to catch the long-range temporal dependence and the congestion classifier is defined accordingly. This distinguishes the proposed model from the conventional congestion recognition methods. Comprehensive experiments are conducted based on real traffic data. The results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over the existing spatiotemporal analysis methods.