Deep Learning for Generating Synthetic Traffic Data

The purpose of the study is to demonstrate the feasibility of combining traffic simulator technology with machine learning (ML) methods to create realistic and comprehensive synthetic traffic data. Synthetic data alleviates many ethical and privacy concerns, significantly reduces the costs associated with data collection, and enables researchers to study scenarios and conditions that are difficult or impossible to replicate in real-world environments. Access to large amounts of diverse and controlled data is essential for developing and testing artificial intelligence (AI) models and leads to more reliable and robust results. Traffic simulators like SUMO have been successfully used for that purpose in the past, creating realistic vehicular traces. One drawback is that, without coupling them with complex physics emulators, they are not capable of generating internal vehicle parameters. Such parameters, on the other hand, are crucial for many purposes, from understanding energy efficiency and optimizing driver behavior to predictive maintenance and monitoring the degradation of key components, such as driveline batteries. In this paper, we propose Synthetic Traffic Data Generator (STDG) and demonstrate that an ML model that is trained on the internal parameters of a vehicle in one set of conditions (Sweden) can be used to generate synthetic data corresponding to another setting (Monaco). The proposed method promises to eliminate the need for an expensive collection of the original vehicle parameters across many different settings. Moreover, sharing the synthetic data with additional stakeholders is easier due to the reduced security and integrity risk of exposing the vehicle’s privacy-sensitive original parameters. This study compares several ML techniques, including deep learning (DL) based, for generating internal parameters of vehicles, such as fuel rate, engine speed, and wet tank air pressure. Using the actual bus data from a small city to train our ML models, we attempt to forecast the internal parameters of the buses in various scenarios. The proposed method first utilizes SUMO to generate synthetic waypoints for the bus and then predicts the other parameters using the trained model, thereby producing synthetic data with internal parameters for buses operating in a new urban environment. Our preliminary results indicated that our model is performing well within a 90% confidence interval.