Intelligent Slime Mould Optimization with Deep Learning Enabled Traffic Prediction in Smart Cities

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is one of the revolutionary technologies in smart cities that helps in reducing traffic congestion and enhancing traffic quality. With the help of big data and communication technologies, ITS offers real-time investigation and highly-effective traffic management. Traffic Flow Prediction (TFP) is a vital element in smart city management and is used to forecast the upcoming traffic conditions on transportation network based on past data. Neural Network (NN) and Machine Learning (ML) models are widely utilized in resolving real-time issues since these methods are capable of dealing with adaptive data over a period of time. Deep Learning (DL) is a kind of ML technique which yields effective performance on data classification and prediction tasks. With this motivation, the current study introduces a novel Slime Mould Optimization (SMO) model with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) model for Traffic Prediction (SMOBGRU-TP) in smart cities. Initially, data preprocessing is performed to normalize the input data in the range of [0, 1] using min-max normalization approach. Besides, BiGRU model is employed for effective forecasting of traffic in smart cities. Moreover, the novelty of the work lies in using SMO algorithm to effectively adjust the hyperparameters of BiGRU method. The proposed SMOBGRU-TP model was experimentally validated and the simulation results established the model’s superior performance in terms of prediction compared to existing techniques.