Riding the Wave: Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Graph Learning for Highway Traffic Flow Prediction Under Overload Scenarios

Highway traffic flow prediction under overload scenarios (HIPO) is a critical problem in intelligent transportation systems, which aims to forecast future traffic patterns on highway segments during periods of exceptionally high demand. Despite its importance, this problem has rarely been explored in recent research due to the unique challenges posed by irregular flow patterns, complex traffic behaviors, and sparse contextual data. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Spatial-Temporal graph network With Adaptive contrastiVE learning (HST-WAVE) to address the HIPO problem. Specifically, we first construct a heterogeneous traffic graph according to the physical highway structure. Then, we develop a multi-scale temporal weaving Transformer and a coupled heterogeneous graph attention network to capture the irregular traffic flow patterns and complex transition behaviors. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive temporal enhancement contrastive learning strategy to bridge the gap between divergent temporal patterns and mitigate data sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world highway network datasets (No. G56 and G60 in Hangzhou, China), showing that our model can effectively handle the HIPO problem and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/luck-seu/HST-WAVE.