As air pollution is regarded as the single largest environmental health risk in Europe it is important that communication to the public is up to date and accurate and provides means to avoid exposure to high air pollution levels. Long- and short-term exposure to outdoor air pollution is associated with increased risks of mortality and morbidity. Up-to-date information on present and coming days' air quality helps people avoid exposure during episodes with high levels of air pollution. Air quality forecasts can be based on deterministic dispersion modelling, but to be accurate this requires detailed information on future emissions, meteorological conditions and process-oriented dispersion modelling. In this paper, we apply different machine learning (ML) algorithms - random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGB), and long short-term memory (LSTM) - to improve 1, 2, and 3d deterministic forecasts of PM10, NOx, and O3 at different sites in Greater Stockholm, Sweden. It is shown that the deterministic forecasts can be significantly improved using the ML models but that the degree of improvement of the deterministic forecasts depends more on pollutant and site than on what ML algorithm is applied. Also, four feature importance methods, namely the mean decrease in impurity (MDI) method, permutation method, gradient-based method, and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) method, are utilized to identify significant features that are common and robust across all models and methods for a pollutant. Deterministic forecasts of PM10 are improved by the ML models through the input of lagged measurements and Julian day partly reflecting seasonal variations not properly parameterized in the deterministic forecasts. A systematic discrepancy by the deterministic forecasts in the diurnal cycle of NOx is removed by the ML models considering lagged measurements and calendar data like hour and weekday, reflecting the influence of local traffic emissions. For O3 at the urban background site, the local photochemistry is not properly accounted for by the relatively coarse Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service ensemble model (CAMS) used here for forecasting O3 but is compensated for using the ML models by taking lagged measurements into account. Through multiple repetitions of the training process, the resulting ML models achieved improvements for all sites and pollutants. For NOx at street canyon sites, mean squared error (MSE) decreased by up to 60%, and seven metrics, such as R2 and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), exhibited consistent results. The prediction of PM10 is improved significantly at the urban background site, whereas the ML models at street sites have difficulty capturing more information. The prediction accuracy of O3 also modestly increased, with differences between metrics. Further work is needed to reduce deviations between model results and measurements for short periods with relatively high concentrations (peaks) at the street canyon sites. Such peaks can be due to a combination of non-typical emissions and unfavourable meteorological conditions, which are rather difficult to forecast. Furthermore, we show that general models trained using data from selected street sites can improve the deterministic forecasts of NOx at the station not involved in model training. For PM10 this was only possible using more complex LSTM models. An important aspect to consider when choosing ML algorithms is the computational requirements for training the models in the deployment of the system. Tree-based models (RF and XGB) require fewer computational resources and yield comparable performance in comparison to LSTM. Therefore, tree-based models are now implemented operationally in the forecasts of air pollution and health risks in Stockholm. Nevertheless, there is big potential to develop generic models using advanced ML to take into account not only local temporal variation but also spatial variation at different stations.

To implement proactive traffic management, traffic forecasting becomes an essential function of modern intelligent transport systems (ITS). Traffic flows on motorways exhibit substantial variability, making it necessary to capture high-frequency patterns in the spatiotemporal model. To address the challenges, a representation learning approach is leveraged in this paper to extract high-level features that facilitate traffic forecasting on motorway. A bottom-up learning structure is proposed to sequentially extract information from local to the global level. Computational experiments show that simple models with informative representation may achieve satisfactory performance for traffic prediction.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) aims to estimate the optimal moment when the maintenance of an industrial asset should be performed according to its actual health status. The goal is to minimize the costs, by finding the optimal point where the sum of the prevention and repair cost is at the lowest. Data-driven model may predict whether an asset is close to a real breakdown, therefore helping to build more cost-efficient maintenance strategies. This paper focuses on survival analysis based predictive maintenance applied to the operation of Battery Electric Trucks (BET). Cox Proportional Hazards and Random Survival Forests methods are adopted for modelling time-to-failure and the associated survival functions. Detailed telematics data from BET vehicles in real operations are used for modelling and analysis. The model performance is further improved by the feature selection and hyperparameter tuning processes.

Forecasting air pollution is an important activity for developing sustainable and smart cities. Generated by various sources, air pollutants distribute in the atmospheric environment due to the complex dispersion processes. The emerging sensor and data technologies have promoted the development of data-driven approaches to replace conventional physical models in urban air pollution forecasting. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to capture the intricate spatial and temporal patterns of air pollutant concentrations measured by heterogeneous sensors, especially for long-term prediction of the multi-variate time series data. This paper proposes a deep learning framework for longer-term forecast of air pollutants concentrations using air pollution sensing data, based on a conceptual framework of meta-graph deep learning. The key modules in the framework include meta-graph units and fusion layers, which are designed to learn temporal and spatial correlations respectively. A detailed case was formulated for forecasting air pollutants in Stockholm using air quality sensing data, meteorological data and so on. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed modelling framework. The computational results show that it outperforms the baseline models and conventional deterministic dispersion models, demonstrating the potential of the framework to be deployed for the real air quality information systems in Stockholm.

Drone-based system is an emerging technology for advanced applications in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). This paper presents our latest developments of a visual perception and analysis system, called AVIATOR, for drone-based road traffic management. The system advances from the previous SeeFar system in several aspects. For visual perception, deep-learning based computer vision models still play the central role but the current system development focuses on fast and efficient detection and tracking performance during real-time image processing. To achieve that, YOLOv7 and ByteTrack models have replaced the previous perception modules to gain better computational performance. Meanwhile, a lane-based traffic steam detection module is added for recognizing detailed traffic flow per lane, enabling more detailed estimation of traffic flow patterns. The traffic analytics module has been modified to estimate traffic states using lane-based data collection. This includes detailed lane-based traffic flow counting as well as traffic density estimation according to vehicle arrival patterns per lane.

Monitoring and forecasting of road traffic conditions is a common practice for real traffic information system, and is of vital importance to traffic management and control. While dynamic traffic patterns can be intuitively represented by space-time diagrams, this study proposes a new concept of space-time image (ST-image) to incorporate physical meanings of traffic state variables. We therefore transform the forecasting problem for time-series traffic states into a conditional image generation problem. We explore the inherent properties of the ST images from the perspectives of physical meaning and traffic dynamics. An innovative deep learning based architecture is designed to process the ST-image, and a diffusion model is trained to obtain traffic forecasts by generating the future ST-images based on the historical patterns.

Motorway traffic management system plays important roles for modern Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). The Swedish motorways near large cities such as Stockholm are equipped with a large number of sensors for traffic monitoring and advanced traffic management purposes. This paper introduces our recent experiments of digitalising motorway traffic system using vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication and other sensors deployed for measuring road traffic and road-side air pollutants. In addition to the deployment of V2X testbed, a Cyber-Physical system (CPS) framework is presented to integrate the deployed sensors with the computational models for estimation and prediction of traffic and road-side environmental conditions. A digital twin of motorway traffic flow is established using traffic flow models of different levels. The computation in experiment of the cyber space shows that traffic states can be estimated using V2X sensing data by applying the model-based estimation approach.

Accurate prediction of highway traffic is of vital importance to proactive traffic monitoring, operation and controls. In the data mining of highway traffic, abstracting temporal knowledge is often prioritized than exploring topological relationship. In this study, we propose a deep learning model, called Knowledge-Sequence-to-Sequence (K-Seq2Seq), to solve the short-term highway traffic prediction problem in two stages: representing temporal knowledge and predicting future traffic. Through computational experiment in a road section of a Swedish motorway, we show that our model outperforms the conventional Seq2Seq model significantly, more than 20% when predicting information of longer time step.

Road link speed is often employed as an essential measure of traffic state in the operation of an urban traffic network. Not only real-time traffic demand but also signal timings and other local planning factors are major influential factors. This paper proposes a short-term traffic speed prediction approach, called PL-WGAN, for urban road networks, which is considered an important part of a novel parallel learning framework for traffic control and operation. The proposed method applies Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets (WGAN) for robust data-driven traffic modeling using a combination of generative neural network and discriminative neural network. The generative neural network models the road link features of the adjacent intersections and the control parameters of intersections using a hybrid graph block. In addition, the spatial-temporal relations are captured by stacking a graph convolutional network (GCN), a recurrent neural network (RNN), and an attention mechanism. A comprehensive computational experiment was carried out including comparing model prediction and computational performances with several state-of-the-art deep learning models. The proposed approach has been implemented and applied for predicting short-term link traffic speed in a large-scale urban road network in Hangzhou, China. The results suggest that it provides a scalable and effective traffic prediction solution for urban road networks. 

This paper proposes GraphPro, a short-term link speed prediction framework for signalized urban traffic networks. Different from other traditional approaches that adopt only reactive inputs (i.e., surrounding traffic data), GraphPro also accepts proactive inputs (i.e., traffic signal timing). This allows GraphPro to predict link speed more accurately, depending on whether or not there is a contextual change in traffic signal timing. A Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) structure, including a generator (prediction model) and a discriminator, is employed to incorporate unprecedented network traffic states and ensures a high level of generalizability for the prediction model. A hybrid graph block, comprised of a reactive cell and a proactive cell, is implemented into each neural layer of the generator. In order to jointly capture spatio-temporal influences and signal contextual information on traffic links, the two cells adopt several key neural network-based components, including graph convolutional network, recurrent neural architecture, and self-attention mechanism. The double-cell structure ensures GraphPro learns from proactive input only when required. The effectiveness and efficiency of GraphPro are tested on a short-term link speed prediction task using real-world traffic data. Due to the capabilities of learning from real data distribution and generating unseen samples, GraphPro offers a more reliable and robust prediction when compared with state-of-the-art data-driven models.