Traffic Performance GPT (TP-GPT): Real-Time Data Informed Intelligent ChatBot for Transportation Surveillance and Management

Abstract: The digitization of traffic sensing infrastructure has significantly accumulated an extensive traffic data warehouse, which presents unprecedented challenges for transportation analytics. The complexities associated with querying large-scale multi-table databases require specialized programming expertise and labor-intensive development. Additionally, traditional analysis methods have focused mainly on numerical data, often neglecting the semantic aspects that could enhance interpretability and understanding. Furthermore, real-time traffic data access is typically limited due to privacy concerns. To bridge this gap, the integration of LLMs into the domain of traffic management presents a transformative approach to addressing the complexities and challenges inherent in modern transportation systems. This paper proposes an intelligent online chatbot, TP-GPT, for efficient customized transportation surveillance and management empowered by a large real-time traffic database. The innovative framework leverages contextual and generative intelligence of LLMs to generate accurate SQL queries and natural language interpretations by employing transportation-specialized prompts, Chain-of-Thought prompting, few-shot learning, multi-agent collaboration strategy, and chat memory. Experimental study demonstrates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as GPT-4 and PaLM 2 on a challenging traffic-analysis benchmark TransQuery. TP-GPT would aid researchers and practitioners in real-time transportation surveillance and management in a privacy-preserving, equitable, and customizable manner.