Vehicular Movement Patterns: A Sequential Patterns Data Mining Approach Towards Vehicular Route Prediction

Behavioral patterns prediction in the context of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) has been receiving increasing attention due to enabling on-demand, intelligent traffic analysis and response to real-time traffic issues. One of these patterns, sequential patterns, are a type of behavioral patterns that describe the occurence of events in a timelyordered fashion. In the context of VANETs, these events are defined as an ordered list of road segments traversed by vehicles during their trips from a starting point to their final intended destination, forming a vehicular path. Due to their predictable nature, undertaken vehicular paths can be exploited to extract the paths that are considered frequent. From the extracted frequent paths through data mining, the probability that a vehicular path will take a certain direction is obtained. However, in order to achieve this, samples of vehicular paths need to be initially collected over periods of time in order to be data-mined accordingly. In this thesis, a new set of formal definitions depicting vehicular paths as sequential patterns is described. Also, five novel communication schemes have been designed and implemented under a simulated environment to collect vehicular paths; such schemes are classified under two categories: Road Side Unit-Triggered (RSU-Triggered) and Vehicle-Triggered. After collection, extracted frequent paths are obtained through data mining, and the probability of these frequent paths is measured. In order to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes, extensive experimental analysis has been realized. From the results, two of the Vehicle-Triggered schemes, VTB-FP and VTRD-FP, have improved the vehicular path collection operation in terms of communication cost and latency over others. In terms of reliability, the Vehicle-Triggered schemes achieved a higher success rate than the RSU-Triggered scheme. Finally, frequent vehicular movement patterns have been effectively extracted from the collected vehicular paths according to a user-defined threshold and the confidence of generated movement rules have been measured. From the analysis, it was clear that the user-defined threshold needs to be set accordingly in order to not discard important vehicular movement patterns.