Bus Dynamic Travel Time Prediction: Using a Deep Feature Extraction Framework Based on RNN and DNN

Travel time data is an important factor for evaluating the performance of a public transport system. In terms of time and space within the nature of uncertainty, bus travel time is dynamic and flexible. Since the change of traffic status is periodic, contagious or even sudden, the changing mechanism of that is a hidden mode. Therefore, bus travel time prediction is a challenging problem in intelligent transportation system (ITS). Allowing for a large amount of traffic data can be collected at present but lack of precisely-conducting, it is still worth exploring how to extract feature sets that can accurately predict bus travel time from these data. Hence, a feature extraction framework based on the deep learning models were developed to reflect the state of bus travel time. First, the study introduced different historical stages of bus signaling time, taxi speed, the stop identity (ID) of spatial characteristics, and real-time possible arrival time, signified by fourteen spatiotemporal characteristic values. Then, an embedding network is proposed to leverage a wide and deep structure to mate the spatial and temporal data. In order to meet the temporal dependence requirements, an attention mechanism for a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) was designed in this research in order to capture the temporal information. Finally, a Deep Neural Networks (DNN) was implemented in this research in order to achieve the dynamic bus travel time prediction. Two case studies of Guangzhou and Shenzhen were tested. The results showed that the performance of the algorithm was more efficient than that of the traditional machine-learning model and promoted by 4.82% compared to the deep neural network applied to the initial feature space. Moreover, the study visualized the weighted cost of attention on the bus’s travel time features during a certain running state. Therefore, the study demonstrated the proposed model enabled to understand the characteristic data of transit travel time with visualization.