Spatial-temporal graph convolution network model with traffic fundamental diagram information informed for network traffic flow prediction

Accurate and fine-grained traffic state prediction has always been an important research field. For long-term traffic flow prediction, the high-dimensional and coupled traffic feature evolution patterns are deeply recessive, posing challenges in effectively characterizing and modeling them. This paper proposed a novel spatial–temporal graph convolution network model with traffic Fundamental Diagram (FD) information informed. The model decouples the high-dimensional spatiotemporal relationships in the transportation network and fully leverages the physical evolution laws of traffic states. First, the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with a spatial attention mechanism was proposed to capture spatial relations of the road network. The mechanism can better represent the spatial dynamics of the graph adjacency matrix in GCN. Second, this study injected prior physical knowledge into the graph adjacency matrix. This process was achieved by embedding characteristics of FDs from historical traffic data on the diagonal of the matrix, by which the propagation pattern of traffic states in road network could be considered. Third, to further catch the time dependence of the road network, the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) structure and the Transformer encoding structure were employed to locally and globally reform traffic state time sequences. Finally, experiments on a revised traffic dataset demonstrated that the proposed method consistently outperforms other baselines regarding Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Square Error across all cases. Moreover, it achieved the optimal Mean Absolute Percentage Error in the 30- and 60-minute prediction tasks. This study shows a novel solution to inform traffic physical laws into data-driven state prediction models, and the reliability of the proposed method in long-term prediction offers valuable support for improving traffic management and alleviating traffic congestion.