Reason Study on Imbalanced Traffic Flow on Temporal and Spatial Distribution for Urban Road Network

Imbalanced traffic flow on temporal and spatial distribution is one reason that many “neighbor roads” (i.e., roads in close proximity to each other) suffer from serious traffic congestion. To find the reason, this paper has selected one congested area from Harbin and Xiamen respectively as a case study with AMAP traffic data. Then, this paper has updated the Apriori algorithm to be more relevant for traffic flow analysis by considering road classification and road link relationship, and applied the Apriori algorithm on AMAP traffic data to analyze traffic flow distribution and road link relationship based on different time slot, different road traffic state (smooth, slow speed, and congested) and road topology structure. The results showed that traffic flow on certain roads on temporal and spatial distribution was closely related to traffic flow state and road link relationship. It also showed that the variation of traffic flow in neighbor roads was related to traffic flow state of those neighbor roads.