Patent ID: 8762036

Claim:
A method for predicting a future travel time on a link, comprising: a training phase comprising the steps of: collecting training travel times on the link for training seasonal intervals; determining training inflows from the training travel times; estimating a seasonal component of the training inflows; subtracting the seasonal component from the training inflows to obtain training deviations from the training inflows; determining statistics from the training deviations, wherein the seasonal components and the statistics form a model of traffic flow on the link; and a prediction phase comprising the steps of: collecting current travel times on the link for current seasonal intervals; determine current inflows from the current travel times; subtracting, for a most recent travel time from a most recent inflow to obtain a current deviation; estimating, for a future time a predicted deviation using the statistics; adding the seasonal component to the predicted deviation to obtain a predicted inflow; and determining the future travel time from the predicted inflow.