Research Progress of Short Term Traffic Flow Prediction Methods

Real-time,accurate and efficiency short term traffic flow prediction is one of the key technologies to realize traffic flow guidance and traffic control,which has being widely concerned in the domain of ITS during recent years.Firstly,the attributes and requirements of traffic flow were introduced in this paper.Then,the prediction methods were fallen into 4 categories:linear,nonlinear,hybrid,and traffic flow based.The present forecasting models' advantages and disadvantages were summarized and commented at the same time.Subsequently,the hot topics in the field of traffic flow prediction were also discussed.Finally,the future research direction is pointed out.