Predicting times of waiting on red signals using BERT

Abstract: We present a method for approximating outcomes of road traffic simulations using BERT-based models, which may find applications in, e.g., optimizing traffic signal settings, especially with the presence of autonomous and connected vehicles. The experiments were conducted on a dataset generated using the Traffic Simulation Framework software runs on a realistic road network. The BERT-based models were compared with 4 other types of machine learning models (LightGBM, fully connected neural networks and 2 types of graph neural networks) and gave the best results in terms of all the considered metrics.