Real-Time Traffic State Estimation on Urban Road Network: The Application of Unscented Kalman Filter

Feedback approach for real-time traffic state estimation on urban road with signalized intersection is presented. The conventional discretization of kinematic wave model for freeway based on demand and supply concept is modified in order to be capable of describing traffic state on urban road with signalized intersection and to better estimate of traffic speed. The novel filter, namely Unscented Kalman filter (UKF), is used as a correction algorithm to make the estimate to be consistent with observed traffic data. Numerical tests show superiority of the modified model over the conventional model on speed estimation and the improvement in flow estimation when combining the model with UKF.