Short-term travel time forecasts for transport information system in Hong Kong

In this paper, a case study is carried out in Hong Kong for demonstration of the Transport Information System (TIS) prototype. A traffic flow simulator (TFS) is presented to forecast the short-term travel times that can be served as a predicted travel time database for the TIS in Hong Kong. In the TFS, a stochastic deviation coefficient is incorporated to simulate the minute-by-minute fluctuation of traffic flows within the peak hour period. The purposes of the case study are: 1) to show the applicability of the TFS for larger-scale road network; and 2) to illustrate the short-term forecasting of path travel times in practice. The results of the case study show that the TFS can be applied to real network effectively. The predicted travel times are compared with the observed travel times on the selected paths for an OD pair. The results show that the observed path travel times fall in the 90% confidence interval of the predicted path travel times.