Big Data Analytics Architecture for Real-Time Traffic Control

The advent of Big Data has triggered disruptive changes in many fields including Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The emerging connected technologies created around ubiquitous digital devices have opened unique opportunities to enhance the performance of the ITS. However, magnitude and heterogeneity of the Big Data are beyond the capabilities of the existing approaches in ITS. Therefore, there is a crucial need to develop new tools and systems to keep pace with the Big Data proliferation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and flexible architecture based on distributed computing platform for real-time traffic control. The architecture is based on systematic analysis of the requirements of the existing traffic control systems. In it, the Big Data analytics engine informs the control logic. We have partly realized the architecture in a prototype platform that employs Kafka, a state-of-the-art Big Data tool for building data pipelines and stream processing. We demonstrate our approach on a case study of controlling the opening and closing of a freeway hard shoulder lane in microscopic traffic simulation.