TransETA: transformer networks for estimated time of arrival with local congestion representation

Estimated time of arrival (ETA) is an estimate of the vehicle travel time from the origin to destination in the roadworks. From the perspective of travel planning or resource allocation, accurate ETA is significantly important. In recent years, deep learning-based methods represented by recurrent neural networks has been widely used in travel time prediction tasks, but such methods cannot effectively learn data association at different moments. At the same time, the existing methods do not effectively leverage local traffic information. Targeting these challenges, this paper proposes a new model TransETA to predict vehicle travel time. The model includes three modules: the input feature transformation module uses graph convolutional network (GCN) to extract the local congestion feature, the deep forest module mainly deals with static trajectory data, and ETA-Transformer module processes the feature extraction of dynamic trajectory data. Finally, we conducted experiments on two large trajectory datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid deep learning method, TransETA, outperforms the state-of-the-art models. On the Chengdu and Porto datasets, our proposed method shows an improvement of 6s and 9s in mean absolute error compared to the current best performing method, respectively. Also the average absolute percentage error is reduced by 2.34% and 3.64% respectively. The effectiveness of each module was approved through ablation experiments. Specifically, local congestion information representation can effectively improve the accuracy of the prediction. ETA-Transformer module is more effective in extracting spatio-temporal feature correlation than the LSTM-based method.