Periodic Transformer Encoder for Multi-Horizon Travel Time Prediction

In the domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), ensuring reliable travel time predictions is crucial for enhancing the efficiency of transportation management systems and supporting long-term planning. Recent advancements in deep learning have demonstrated the ability to effectively leverage large datasets for accurate travel time predictions. These innovations are particularly vital as they address both short-term and long-term travel demands, which are essential for effective traffic management and scheduled routing planning. Despite advances in deep learning applications for traffic analysis, the dynamic nature of traffic patterns frequently challenges the forecasting capabilities of existing models, especially when forecasting both immediate and future traffic conditions across various time horizons. Additionally, the area of long-term travel time forecasting still remains not fully explored in current research due to these complexities. In response to these challenges, this study introduces the Periodic Transformer Encoder (PTE). PTE is a Transformer-based model designed to enhance traffic time predictions by effectively capturing temporal dependencies across various horizons. Utilizing attention mechanisms, PTE learns from long-range periodic traffic data for handling both short-term and long-term fluctuations. Furthermore, PTE employs a streamlined encoder-only architecture that eliminates the need for a traditional decoder, thus significantly simplifying the model’s structure and reducing its computational demands. This architecture enhances both the training efficiency and the performance of direct travel time predictions. With these enhancements, PTE effectively tackles the challenges presented by dynamic traffic patterns, significantly improving prediction performance across multiple time horizons. Comprehensive evaluations on an extensive real-world traffic dataset demonstrate PTE’s superior performance in predicting travel times over multiple horizons compared to existing methods. PTE is notably effective in adapting to high-variability road segments and peak traffic hours. These results prove PTE’s effectiveness and robustness across diverse traffic environments, indicating its significant contribution to advancing traffic prediction capabilities within ITS.