A Novel Method for Analyzing Weather Effect on Smart City Traffic

Traffic congestion has become more concerning as the number of cars has rapidly increased in urban environments, resulting in dangerous pollution levels amid global warming. The effect of weather factors on traffic flow is evident thus studying this relationship can improve traffic prediction, which can help us to prevent or dissolve traffic congestion in smart cities where intelligent transportation systems have been deployed. In this paper, a new method, the Weather Based Traffic Analysis (hereafter WBTA) has been proposed to investigate the temporal correlations between traffic flow and exogenous weather factors, at different frequencies and time intervals. This can help in the proper selection of the most important weather factors which influence traffic flow behavior, in addition to the duration of that effect. This can help in choosing input parameters of a multi-input traffic prediction model. Several weather factors are analyzed, however, for the sake of this paper, the precipitation factor is discussed.