Incorporation of the Rainfall Data in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

INCORPORATION OF THE RAINFALL DATA IN INTELLIGENT

TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES
Nikola Mitrovic1, Dusan Jolovic2, Darko Cvoric3 and Justin Dauwels4
1
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, nikola001@e.ntu.edu.sg
2
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, djolovic@nmsu.edu
3
Routing Ltd, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, darko.cvoric@routingbl.com
4
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, jdauwels@ntu.edu.sg

Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) often operate on large road networks and gather traffic-related
information from multiple sources. The collected information can prove highly useful for management centers in
generating the operational strategies for regular and especially non-recurrent traffic conditions. In this study, we focus on
rainfall information, obtained from meteorological stations, and explore how this exogenous information can be
embedded in ITS. We present the results of the most recent studies that analyze the impact of the rainfall on traffic
stream parameters. We also provide an overview of the commonly used techniques to (pre)process rainfall data since it
has not been primarily collected for traffic purposes. We discuss the effect of the rainfall data on prediction performance
of traffic parameters in the context of data-driven techniques. Finally, we highlight the shortcomings of the existing
research and explore the feasibility of the similar ITS platforms for traffic network of Serbia.

Keywords: ITS, traffic prediction, rainfall data, non-recurrent traffic conditions, weather

1. INTRODUCTION

With the recent improvements in sensor technology, traffic information has been collected from multiple
sources with a high temporal resolution. Once this data is received and fused with other relevant information
within traffic management centers (TMC), decision processes are executed, and this data then drives real-
time applications/systems such as travel time messages and variable speed limits. The generated traffic
information is frequently disseminated via a wireless network and delivered to the end-user through the
smartphone or in-vehicle device [1].

In the recent years significant attention has been dedicated to the traffic-related information that is not
inherently dedicated for traffic applications. In particular, information about the rainfall, explicitly collected for
weather forecasting purposes, can prove highly useful for management centers in dealing with non-recurrent
traffic conditions [2,3]. However, (pre)processing of the data obtained from “external” sources should be
carefully considered due to their intrinsic nature. This problem tends to be even more severe in coming years
due to ever-growing performance of sensor technology and its capability to gather various traffic-related
data.

In this paper we discuss the potential and challenges of the rainfall data in the context of traffic applications.
We start by presenting an overview of the most recent traffic-related studies that are dealing with information
about the rainfall. Then, we explore the key features of the collected rainfall data such as sampling rate and
data structure. In the former, the rainfall data is often collected with a high temporal resolution (5-10 min).
However, for offline analysis information about the rainfall is frequently aggregated on hourly or even daily
increments which might significantly limit potential of gathered data. In the context of structure of the
collected data, the explicit rainfall information is frequently given either in the form of an image (see Fig. 1
left) or as explicit numerical values plotted on the top of an underlying map (see Fig. 1 right). These
numerical values often represent an average rainfall intensity for a (sub) region. The implicit information
about the rainfall might be obtained from the social media (e.g., Twitter) and video cameras.

Collected rainfall data set (see Fig. 1) suffer unavoidable missing values due to occasional irregularities in
reporting rainfall maps, especially during inclement weather. We present Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) technique in combination with straightforward interpolation method to deal with the problem of missing
data. OCR technique is capable of accurately extracting the “time-stamp” information from the rainfall-map
data (see upper left corner of Fig. 1 left). This information helps us to match, in temporal context, weather
and corresponding traffic information. In order to efficiently match the rainfall and traffic data in a spatial
manner, we propose incorporation of Geographical Information System’s components such as area maps.

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Nikola Mitrovic: nikola001@e.ntu.edu.sg 1
Nikola Mitrovic, Dusan Jolovic, Darko Cvoric, and Justin Dauwels

Figure 1: Rainfall intensity might be represented in the color form (left) and / or associated numerical value
(right) on the top of underlying weather map. Source: http://www.nea.gov.sg/ [4].

Once the weather and traffic information are combined and accurately matched, one could explore the
correlations between the processed traffic and rainfall data. The impact of the rainfall intensity on traffic
conditions should be investigated in different times of the day and for various rainfall intensities and road
categories. Furthermore, this impact of rainfall should be evaluated for current/historical and future traffic
conditions, leading to the common traffic applications such as estimation and prediction, respectively. In the
former, the large historical datasets are used to infer functional relationships between traffic and rainfall data
for various level of data aggregation, ranging from 5-min up to 1-day of sampling rate. In the case of traffic
forecasting, rainfall information is embedded in the short-term prediction models as an exogenous variable.
The performance of these prediction models are frequently evaluated against the benchmark model that
contains only explicit traffic and temporal information, and the same set of model parameters. Noteworthy,
traffic prediction is commonly applied for short-term prediction horizons, ranging from 5 min up to 1 hour.

The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we provide a brief overview of the relevant literature. We
also present the results and challenges of the most recent studies that incorporate information about the
rainfall rate in applications of traffic estimation and prediction. In Section 3, we discuss rainfall information in
the context of available data sources and updating rate. In Section 4 we list the machine learning techniques
that are frequently used to (pre)process, analyze and store the recorded rainfall data. We also present a
methodology to assess the network-wise impact of the rainfall on traffic conditions. In Section 5 we discuss
the potential and challenges of the collected rainfall information for traffic application in the context of
Serbian traffic network. In Section 6 we summarize our work and suggest topics for future research.

2. OVERVIEW OF THE RELEVANT LITERATURE

Weather conditions tend to have a significant impact on the driving behavior and the key parameters of traffic
stream. Various studies have shown that different weather factors such as temperature [5,6], precipitation
[7,8,9] and visibility [10,11], can degrade the capacity while simultaneously increase a frequency of crashes
on the roads. Among these parameters the rainfall intensity is frequently identified as an external factor that
has the highest impact on driving conditions and network performance [7,12]. Even light rain tends to
enhance the drivers’ carefulness and a number of interactions in traffic flow, which in turn, leads to the
reduction in roadway capacity.

The reduction in road capacity changes the relationships between the fundamental traffic parameters (e.g.,
volume, speed, and density) and further leads to unavoidable increase in travel times [7]. In addition, non-
optimal weather conditions affect the driver behavior and comfort. In particular, the reduced visibility can
cause a dramatic increase in a total number of crashes while simultaneously reducing the number of
casualties and severity of these accidents as the consequence of enhanced drivers’ consciousness [8].
Finally, inclement weather might significantly affect the departure time, mode, and the route of the planned
trip [13,14].

Different rainfall intensities can have different impacts on the key traffic stream parameters and their
relationships [12,15,16,17,18]. This quantifiable effect is frequently utilized to develop mathematical and
regression models that can assess and predict traffic conditions based on the given rainfall intensities
[12,15,19,20]. These models that frequently rely on neural networks and various vector autoregressive
moving average methods use the information about the rainfall as an exogenous variable. The results
indicate that rainfall information might prove useful in assessing the traffic conditions during inclement

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Incorporation of the Rainfall Data in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

weather. However, additional information about the rainfall only marginally improves or sometimes even
degrades the performance of traffic forecasting methods [19,21,22,23].

3. DATA COLLECTION

The information about the rainfall intensity, and other weather parameters, are often collected from
automated weather instruments within metheorogical stations [4]. The information is frequently published on
dedicated internet sites and often updated with the high frequency (5-10 minutes) [4]. All recorded data is
often efficiently compressed and stored for the historical analysis. However, in these processes recorded
weather data are frequently aggregated on hourly or even daily bases, which might significantly affect the
applications of the collected data.

With the recent improvements in smart-phone and sensor technology, qualitative information about the
weather condition can be inferred from the social media data [24] and video cameras, respectively. This
qualitative information is continuously recorded in transmitted in the real time, usually by third parties. Due to
large space requirements of the video formats, the data from the traffic cameras are frequently stored for the
short period of time (usually 1-2 days).

4. COMMONLY USED TECHNIQUES

Once the weather data are collected, the next step would be to accurately link them with the corresponding
traffic data in temporal and spatial manners. Optical character recognition (OCR) technique is frequently
used to infer the time attributes from the rainfall data given in the form of a map (see upper-left corner and
top-middle part of Fig. 2). This technique that has been widely deployed in image processing efficiently
converts text images into text in ASCII format. To further increase the accuracy of the OCR, text images
should be scaled and binarized [25]. In the case of the tabular rainfall data, the time value is explicitly
provided [4]. In both cases it is crucial that the rainfall and corresponding traffic data are synchronized, i.e.,
sampling intervals of traffic and weather data overlap significantly.

Figure 2: Rainfall map (Fig 1 left) is integrated with the roadway network in order to assess rainfall intensity at
specific road segment (left). The rainfall intensity of the neighborhood area (middle-bottom part) is often
observed to assess the link-wise rainfall rate. Rainfall is quantified with the help of conventional (right) or
custom (left-bottom corner) scales. Time stamp of the rainfall map (upper left corner) is processed with the
help of OCR in order to infer the time attributes of the recorded figure (top-middle part). Source:
http://www.nea.gov.sg/ [4].

To accurately estimate rainfall intensity at any arbitrary road segment, one needs to overlay rainfall and
traffic road maps in order to estimate the location of the segment on the rainfall map (see left corner of Fig.
2). Then, Doppler Radar reflectivity is used to derive rainfall intensity at a single pixel of the map
visualization.

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Nikola Mitrovic, Dusan Jolovic, Darko Cvoric, and Justin Dauwels

where r is rainfall rate in millimeters per hour, d is reading from the image visualization and a and b are
empirically estimated parameters using a provided scale (see right part of Fig. 2). An alternative way would
be to define a customized scale and estimate the link based rainfall intensity with the help of Red-Green-Blue
values (see bottom-left corner of Fig. 2) [26]. The rainfall intensity at specific segment is often approximated
as the average of rainfall intensities in the area of that segment (see the middle part of Fig. 2). In the case of
numerically provided weather information, the rainfall intensity at certain link is usually estimated using a
straightforward interpolation technique; i.e., as weighted average of the rainfall rates at weather stations in
the link’s neighborhood. The weights are inversely proportional to distances between the road segment and
weather stations.

Quantifying the impact of the rainfall on traffic conditions is not trivial, especially in the context of large traffic
networks. While light showers and moderate amount of rainfall may not have any significant effect on road
traffic, heavy showers, on the other hand, typically have strong impact on driving conditions. Furthermore,
the resultant changes in traffic due to rain may be different during peak hours than non-peak hours. The
changes in traffic conditions may also differ among various road categories in the network. Finally, the
rainfall often affects only a portion of the network and makes the fair comparison of network-wise traffic
conditions during rainy and dry instances even more challenging. In the following we present an adequate
solution for this problem.

Let us assume that the traffic parameter (aij) and the rainfall rate (bij) are given every 5-min for each segment
sj {1,2,..n} during the observational period Ti {1,2,..m}. Let us also restrict our attention on day d and time
instance tin, without any loss of generality. For this d-tin subset, we compute the average network-wise traffic
conditions (Vd-t ) during the inclement weather as a mean value of the average congestion level of the
in

subnetwork C {c1, c2,... cc} ⊆ {a1, a2,... an} where the rainfall intensity bi,j ( i ∈ d-tin) is at least once above the
threshold ℓ. We write that as follows:

where the is the size of subnetwork Cd-tin that corresponds to certain d-tin and
threshold ℓ. shows how many times, for particular d-tin, the rainfall intensity (for link j) is above the
threshold ℓ. Similarly, we compute the network congestion level for dry weather
as the average level of congestion of the identical subset of the links Cd-tin if there is no rain
(bi,j = 0, i ∈ d-tin). We write that as follows:

where ℓ is the total number of instances within the d-tin when the rainfall intensity
(for certain link j) is 0.

State of-the-art techniques that deals with the text and video data are often deployed to infer the weather
information from social media [24] and traffic cameras, respectively. Conventional methods, such as the
ones in [27,28] can also be used for applications of compression and missing data imputations.

4. CHALLENGES

The scope of the relevant studies remains limited to the special cases. For instance, the studies
[12,21,22,23,24] consider a short segment or single intersection only. Moreover, most of the studies deal
with a limited database where the data is frequently collected for short periods such as a few weeks or even
days and often aggregated in hourly or even daily increments [12,19,21,22,23,24,29]. Such an approach

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Incorporation of the Rainfall Data in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

might be inappropriate due to intrinsic nature of the rainfall accidents, which are in general quite rare events
whose severity often vary temporally and spatially.

The applied prediction algorithms are restricted to vector autoregressive moving average methods and
neural networks. Moreover, in most of the cases additional information about the rainfall degrades the
prediction performance. One of the reasons might be underlying prediction mechanism which often assigns
higher importance to historical traffic data then to exogenous information about the rainfall. Another reason
might be insufficient training data points during inclement weather conditions.

5. OPPORTUNITIES FOR TRAFFIC NETWORK IN SERBIA

In Serbia, rain can be persistent throughout the year. The rainfall often affects the driving conditions and the
key trip parameters such as departure time, mode of transportation and chosen route. Quantifying this
impact could help transportation operators to better manage the safety and efficiency of transportation
system during intense rainfall accidents. For instance, the use of variable speed limits (VSLs) during the
rainy conditions can increase the safety by providing the drivers with the information about the speeds that
are appropriate for the prevailing conditions [2]. This information can be displayed on existing and
forthcoming variable message signs along the major highways and arterial roads.

Similarly, weather-responsive signals are capable of generating appropriate timing plans to accommodate
non-recurrent fluctuations in traffic demand and travel speeds, explicitly caused by adverse weather [3]. The
core of these and many other weather-responsive strategies is an accurate assessment of expected
degradation in traffic stream parameters and precise estimation of near-future traffic conditions under the
inclement weather. This degradation varies across the day, network and for different rainfall intensities.
Relevant literature shows that considerable databases of high-resolution traffic and weather data are
required to estimate the amplitude of such degradation in traffic and driving conditions.

6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Information about the rainfall is quite helpful for management centers and often used in traffic-related
applications. Significant amount of research has been dedicated to an investigation of an impact of the
inclement weather on traffic conditions and practical applications of weather-related information in traffic
environment. We list some of the main contributions of the relevant studies and propose their
implementations in Serbian road network:
 Continuous collection of weather and traffic related-parameters with high temporal frequency is
necessary. These databases should be built at first for the major highways (such as E-75) with the
option to be extended to other high-priority regional and city roads.
 Impact of the rainfall on traffic and driving conditions should be carefully explored for different rainfall
thresholds, road categories and periods of the day. Quantifying such impact might prove extremely
helpful for traffic operators in generating time/spatial-dependent solutions and strategies. At first, the
focus should be on variable speed limits and weather-responsive signals since these techniques
have already proven significant benefits in numerous case studies. Then, the scope of the research
should be potentially extended to attractive prediction-related traffic applications that consider
weather data to improve forecasting performance.
 Once the implementation take place, before and after evaluation study on weather related crashes
should be conducted to quantify safety effects of such systems.
 Successful implementation in Serbia can be an encouraging example for the regional countries with
similar climate to implement comparable systems and enhance their traffic operations during
inclement weather conditions.

Future work will be conducted towards an investigation of an impact that adverse weather has on traffic and
driving conditions in the contexts of large network and traffic predictions. A depth analysis of these topics is
still missing in the relevant literature. The benefits of this analysis might be potentially proposed for
implementation in traffic network in Serbia.

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Nikola Mitrovic, Dusan Jolovic, Darko Cvoric, and Justin Dauwels

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