Fog-Cloud-IoT centric collaborative framework for machine learning-based situation-aware traffic management in urban spaces

The issue of traffic mismanagement is getting bad to worse as the trend of urbanization is increasing and posing significant threats to the urban areas. This paper addresses this issue of traffic mismanagement by proposing a Fog-Cloud centric Internet of Things (IoT)-based collaborative framework that enables machine learning-based situation-aware traffic management. This framework monitors the traffic dynamics at the fog layer for providing real-time analytics to the cloud and enabling the traffic situation-aware routing of the vehicles. Whereas the framework at the cloud layer determines the situation-aware analytics by predicting Waiting Time (WaT), Waiting Queue Length (WQueL) and next green phase duration (G) for each Traffic Movement Signal Point (TMSP) based on the real-time data and analytics provided by the fog layer. The road-infrastructure hosted fog layer classifies the In-schedule Reachability Status (IRS) that determines the ability of the vehicle to reach the respective TMSP down the lane before the start of the next green phase. After classifying all such vehicles on a lane by the fog layer, the cloud layer predicts the optimal duration of the next green phase at that respective TMSP to reduce the traffic congestion on the respective junction point and subsequently provides these area-wide analytics to the vehicle hosted fog nodes and traffic controllers on the respective junction points. The vehicles use these analytics for enabling situation-aware vehicle routing functionality by selecting a time optimized path and enabling balanced traffic load on all possible paths. The framework employs Logistic Regression (LR) for IRS classification at the fog layer and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for traffic prediction at the respective TMSP at the cloud layer. The result depiction acknowledges LR’s efficiency compared to other employed classifiers in terms of various statistical parameters. The optimal performance of ANN at the learning rate (LeR) of 0.1, momentum rate (MoR) of 0.95, and 500 epochs depict the prediction efficiency of ANN as compared to other used prediction approach. The contribution of this paper is two functionalities-based working of fog computing for providing real-time and situation-aware traffic analytics, adaptive traffic movement phase planning, time optimized navigation, and optimal traffic load balancing.