A Congestion Diffusion Model with Influence Maximization for Traffic Bottlenecks Identification in Metrocity Scales

Traffic bottlenecks identification plays an important role in traffic planning and provides decision-making for prevention of traffic congestion. Although traffic bottlenecks widely exist, they are difficult to predict because of the changing traffic condition and traffic demand. In this paper, we introduce a traffic congestion diffusion (TCD) model with traffic flow influence (TFI) to capture the traffic dynamics and give a panoramic view for the city by cross domain data fusion. We proposed novel definition of bottleneck from the perspective of influence spread under TCD. The bottlenecks identification problem is modeled as an influence maximization problem, i.e., selecting the top K influential nodes in road networks under certain traffic conditions. We establish the submodularity of influence spread and solve the NP-hard optimal seed selection problem by using an efficient heuristic algorithm (TCD-IM) with provable near-optimal performance guarantees. To the best of our knowledge, this should be the first model for a metro-city scale from the influence perspective. The TCD-IM model is able to identify the dynamic traffic bottlenecks.