Intelligent traffic congestion forecasting using BiLSTM and adaptive secretary bird optimizer for sustainable urban transportation

Traffic congestion forecasting is one of the major elements of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Traffic congestion in urban road networks significantly influences sustainability by increasing air pollution levels. Efficient congestion management enables drivers to bypass heavily trafficked areas and reducing pollutant emissions. However, properly forecasting congestion spread remains challenging due to complex, dynamic, and non-linear nature of traffic patterns. The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced valuable datasets that can support the development of intelligent and sustainable transportation for modern cities. This work presents a Deep Learning (DL) approach of Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) with Adaptive Secretary Bird Optimizer (ASBO) for traffic congestion prediction. The experimentation is evaluated on Traffic Prediction Dataset and achieved better Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) with results of 0.015 and 0.133 respectively. Compared to the existing algorithms like RL, Deep Q Learning (DQL), LSTM and BiLSTM, the RL - BiLSTM with ASBO outperformed with the parameters MSE, RMSE, R2, MAE and MAPE with 37%, 27.44%, 26%, 33.52% and 35.8% respectively. The better performance demonstrates that RL- BiLSTM with ASBO is well-suited to predict congestion patterns in road networks.