On a Clustering-Based Approach for Traffic Sub-area Division

Traffic sub-area division is an important problem in traffic management and control. This paper proposes a clustering-based approach to this problem that takes into account both temporal and spatial information of vehicle trajectories. Considering different orders of magnitude in time and space, we employ a z-score scheme for uniformity and design an improved density peak clustering method based on a new density definition and similarity measure to extract hot regions. We design a distribution-based partitioning method that employs k-means algorithm to split hot regions into a set of traffic sub-areas. For performance evaluation, we develop a traffic sub-area division criterium based on the S(D)bw indicator and the classical Davies-Bouldin index in the literature. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach improves traffic sub-area division quality over existing methods.