Short-term traffic flow prediction plays a key role of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which supports traffic planning, traffic management and control, roadway safety evaluation, energy consumption estimation, etc. The widely deployed traffic sensors provide us numerous and continuous traffic flow data, which may contain outlier samples due to expected sensor failures. The primary objective of the study was to evaluate the use of various smoothing models for cleaning anomaly in traffic flow data, which were further processed to predict short term traffic flow evolution with artificial neural network. The wavelet filter, moving average model, and Butterworth filter were carefully tested to smooth the collected loop detector data. Then, the artificial neural network was introduced to predict traffic flow at different time spans, which were quantitatively analyzed with commonly-used evaluation metrics. The findings of the study provide us efficient and accurate denoising approaches for short term traffic flow prediction.

Supplier selection is a complex multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which considers a number of alternative suppliers as well as conflicting and noncommensurable criteria. Considering the fact that it is difficult to precisely determine criteria weights and the ratings of alternatives on each criterion in real-life situations, the VIKOR (VIsekriterijumska optimizacija i KOmpromisno Resenje) method has been modified for intuitionistic fuzzy data in this study for supplier evaluation and selection. Further, we take into account both subjective and objective weights of criteria in the decision-making process, as most supplier selection approaches consider only subjective criteria weights. Finally, two supplier selection examples are provided to illustrate the proposed intuitionistic fuzzy hybrid VIKOR (IFH-VIKOR) method, and its merits are highlighted by comparing it with other relevant approaches.

Ship tracking provides crucial on-site microscopic kinematic traffic information which benefits maritime traffic flow analysis, ship safety enhancement, traffic control, etc., and thus has attracted considerable research attentions in the maritime surveillance community. Conventional ship tracking methods yield satisfied results by exploring distinct visual ship features in maritime images, which may fail when the target ship is partially or fully sheltered by obstacles (e.g., ships, waves, etc.) in maritime videos. To overcome the difficulty, we propose an augmented ship tracking framework via the kernelized correlation filter (KCF) and curve fitting algorithm. First, the KCF model is introduced to track ships in the consecutive maritime images and obtain raw ship trajectory dataset. Second, the data anomaly detection and rectification procedure are implemented to rectify the contaminated ship positions. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we implement the proposed framework and another three popular ship tracking models on the four typical ship occlusion videos. The experimental results show that our proposed framework successfully tracks ships in maritime video clips with high accuracy (i.e., the average root mean square error (RMSE), root mean square percentage error (RMSPE), mean absolute deviation (MAD) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) are less than 10), which significantly outperforms the other popular ship trackers.

Maritime ship detection plays a crucial role in smart ships and intelligent transportation systems. However, adverse maritime weather conditions, such as rain streak and fog, can significantly impair the performance of visual systems for maritime traffic. These factors constrain the performance of traffic monitoring systems and ship-detection algorithms for autonomous ship navigation, affecting maritime safety. The paper proposes an approach to resolve the problem by visually removing rain streaks and fog from images, achieving an integrated framework for accurate ship detection. Firstly, the paper employs an attention generation network within an adversarial neural network to focus on the distorted regions of the degraded images. The paper also utilizes a contextual encoder to infer contextual information within the distorted regions, enhancing the credibility of image restoration. Secondly, a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) is introduced to achieve rapid multi-scale feature fusion, enhancing the accuracy of maritime ship detection. The proposed GYB framework was validated using the SeaShip dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves an average accuracy of 96.3%, a recall of 95.35%, and a harmonic mean of 95.85% in detecting maritime traffic ships under rain-streak and foggy-weather conditions. Moreover, the framework outperforms state-of-the-art ship detection methods in such challenging weather scenarios.

Accurate traffic flow data is crucial for traffic control and management in an intelligent transportation system (ITS), and thus traffic flow prediction research attracts significant attention in the transportation community. Previous studies have suggested that raw traffic flow data may be contaminated by noises caused by unexpected reasons (e.g., loop detector damage, roadway maintenance, etc.), which may degrade traffic flow prediction accuracy. To address this issue, we proposed an ensemble framework via ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and artificial neural network (ANN) to predict traffic flow under different time intervals ahead. More specifically, the proposed framework firstly employed the EEMD model to suppress the noises in the raw traffic data, which were then processed to predict traffic flow at time steps under different time scales (i.e., 1, 2, and 10 min). We verified our model performance on three loop detectors’ data, which were supported by the Department of Transportation, Minnesota. The research findings can help traffic participants collect more accurate traffic flow data and thus benefits transportation practitioners by helping them to make more reasonable traffic decisions.