The long-term prediction of highway traffic parameters is frequently undermined by cumulative errors from various influencing factors and unforeseen events, resulting in diminished predictive accuracy and applicability. In the pursuit of sustainable highway development and eco-friendly transportation strategies, forecasting these traffic flow parameters has emerged as an urgent concern. To mitigate issues associated with cumulative error and unexpected events in long-term forecasts, this study leverages the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method to deconstruct time series data. This aims to minimize disturbances from data fluctuations, thereby enhancing data quality. We also incorporate the BiLSTM model, ensuring bidirectional learning from extended time series data for a thorough extraction of relevant insights. In a pioneering effort, this research integrates the attention mechanism with the EMD–BiLSTM model. This synergy deeply excavates the spatiotemporal characteristics of traffic volume data, allocating appropriate weights to significant information, which markedly boosts predictive precision and speed. Through comparisons with ARIMA, LSTM, and BiLSTM models, we demonstrate the distinct advantage of our approach in predicting traffic volume and speed. In summary, our study introduces a groundbreaking technique for the meticulous forecasting of highway traffic volume. This serves as a robust decision-making instrument for both sustainable highway development and transportation management, paving the way for more sustainable, efficient, and environmentally conscious highway transit.

Connected vehicle (CV) technologies are changing the form of traditional traffic models. In the CV driving environment, abundant and accurate information is available to vehicles, promoting the development of control strategies and models. Under these circumstances, this paper proposes a bidirectional vehicles information structure (BDVIS) by making use of the acceleration information of one preceding vehicle and one following vehicle to improve the car-following models. Then, we deduced the derived multiple vehicles information structure (DMVIS), including historical movement information of multiple vehicles, without the acceleration information. Next, the paper embeds the four kinds of basic car-following models into the framework to investigate the stability condition of two structures under the small perturbation of traffic flow and explored traffic response properties with different proportions of forward-looking or backward-looking terms. Under the open boundary condition, simulations on a single lane are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis. The results indicated that BDVIS and the DMVIS perform better than the original car-following model in improving the traffic flow stability, but that they have their own advantages for differently positioned vehicles in the platoon. Moreover, increasing the proportions of the preceding and following vehicles presents a benefit to stability, but if traffic is stable, an increase in any of the parameters would extend the influence time, which reveals that neither β₁ or β₂ is the biggest the best for the traffic.

The deployment of Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) gantry systems marks a transformative advancement in the journey toward an interconnected and intelligent highway traffic infrastructure. The integration of these systems signifies a leap forward in streamlining toll collection and minimizing environmental impact through decreased idle times. To solve the problems of missing sensor data in an ETC gantry system with large volumes and insufficient traffic detection among ETC gantries, this study constructs a high-order tensor model based on the analysis of the high-dimensional, sparse, large-volume, and heterogeneous characteristics of ETC gantry data. In addition, a missing data completion method for the ETC gantry data is proposed based on an improved dynamic tensor flow model. This study approximates the decomposition of neighboring tensor blocks in the high-order tensor model of the ETC gantry data based on tensor Tucker decomposition and the Laplacian matrix. This method captures the correlations among space, time, and user information in the ETC gantry data. Case studies demonstrate that our method enhances ETC gantry data quality across various rates of missing data while also reducing computational complexity. For instance, at a less than 5% missing data rate, our approach reduced the RMSE for time vehicle distance by 0.0051, for traffic volume by 0.0056, and for interval speed by 0.0049 compared to the MATRIX method. These improvements not only indicate a potential for more precise traffic data analysis but also add value to the application of ETC systems and contribute to theoretical and practical advancements in the field.