International Conference on Transportation and Development 2020 231

A Method for Urban Road Waterlogging Recognition Based on Fundamental

Diagram

Xianma Tang1; Jiandong Qiu2; and Kaiyan Fu3

1
Shenzhen Urban Transportation Planning and Design Research Center, Shenzhen, China. Email:
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1162052264@qq.com
2
Shenzhen Urban Transportation Planning and Design Research Center, Shenzhen, China. Email:
737269682@qq.com
3
Shenzhen Urban Transportation Planning and Design Research Center, Shenzhen, China. Email:
fukaiy@sutpc.com

ABSTRACT

In many developing cities with impropriate urban planning strategy and poor drainage system
always suffer waterlogging problem during heavy rains. Waterlogging, as a well-known urgent
problem for urban development, will increase risk of traffic accidents, cause malfunction of
transportation system, and seriously threaten people lives. However, those harm can be effectively
reduced by giving an early warning to citizens after detecting the water accumulation. Some
existing methods based on detective sensor are proved to be expensive and low precision. Other
methods try to apply macro simulation model to predict result of waterlogging, but complicated
mathematical modeling, as well as getting access to geographic information and related data
sources, is hard to implement. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective data-based approach for
waterlogging recognition built on fundamental diagram (FD) of traffic flow. The methodology
implements a real-time intelligent recognition on waterlogging points by observing shift on FD
and calculating the probability of waterlogging. Compared to existing methods, it has the better
applicability on entire urban road network, the easier realizability on application implementation,
and more independent on data requirement. A study case of Shenzhen (a city in southern China)
waterlogging indicates the methodology can effectively provide a real-time recognition on road
segments prone to water accumulation during rainstorm, and the accuracy is proved to be better
than any other similar approaches.
Keyword: Waterlogging; Water accumulation; Real-time recognition; Fundamental diagram
of traffic flow.

1. INTRODUCTION

In the weather of heavy rainfall, once the urban drainage system is unable to channel the
rainwater in time or even paralyzed, the transportation system may be gridlocked due to partial
lane closure or a full closure of some roadway. Though such waterlogging disaster may not
happen very often, it do causes severe traffic and economic losses in the coastal city during rainy

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season. For example, a flooding disaster occurred in China Shenzhen on September 2018 due to
the impact of typhoon ―Shanzhu‖, causing severe traffic congestion widespread in city. Some
main roads got flooded and then blocked during even after the typhoon, which caused a lot of
inconvenience to resident’s travel. Therefore, proposing an effective method of real time
recognition on road segments where waterlogging occurred, will be of great value to drivers and
pedestrians for a smart route decision. On the other hand, the identification of frequent
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waterlogging roads is really helpful to the relevant government departments for an improvement
on traffic management and sewerage system.
All researches on urban road waterlogging can be classified into two groups according to
different implemented methods. Some researchers proposed methods of using sensor devices to
detect the road waterlogging (He Q, 2009; Chen XA et al., 2012; Wu S, 2015; Ma CG, 2016).
But those methods were costly on both construction and maintenance, proven to be less
applicable to a city scale. Other experts focused their studies on trained models with great
accuracy, which can be further divided into two individual categories: prediction model and
recognition model. Prediction model deduces possible waterlogged roads by analyzing the cause
of waterlogging which includes rainfall, terrain, altitude, and drainage (You FC et al., 2013;
Zhen SS et al., 2014; Su BN et al., 2016), and recognition model identifies waterlogged roads
according to the impact that waterlogging has on road traffic, such as decrease of traffic flow and
vehicle speed (Xu J et al., 2009; Du L, 2011; Liu J, 2014). Before training prediction model,
some data like urban roads network geographic information, drainage system information, and
real-time rainfall information are necessary but hard to obtain. In contrast, the recognition model
only takes road traffic information as prerequisite, which is much easier to get access to. Liu et al.
(2013) proposed a method to recognize waterlogging points under overpass based on traffic flow
and vehicle speed information. However, this method only considered a situation where roads
got blocked by waterlogging, ignored other possible results the waterlogging could make to road
traffic, and applied to specific road rather than the whole city.
Along the recognition model, the traffic flow fundamental diagram (also called FD model)
seems to be more suitable to find out the correlation between traffic features during waterlogging.
FD model is generally divided into three categories: speed-volume model, density-speed model,
and volume-density model. The density-speed model was proposed in 1935 by Greenshields who
found a linear relationship between traffic speed and volume by observing curve of dataset, and
later many researches verified the correlation between them (Underwood, 1961; Newell, 1961;
Castillo, 1995; Wang HZ et al., 2011). Nowadays, the FD model was widely applied into
transportation, such as calculating free flow velocity and road traffic capacity (Zhang SR et al.,
2010), and analyzing traffic capacity changes of road segment where there mixed with motor
vehicles and self-driving vehicles (Yao ZH, 2019).
Therefore, this paper proposed a real-time recognition method for urban road waterlogging
based on FD model which can be easily constructed after obtaining road traffic datasets. The
main idea of proposed method is to observe the traffic flow parameters changes in FD, which

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reflects the inherent property of road capacity. Based on circumstance that road capacity
decreases when waterlogging occurs, the method can effectively recognizes impact the
waterlogging has on road capacity and then realize the real-time recognition of road
waterlogging. Compared with other methods, it has the advantages of easier data collection,
simpler model implementation, and wider area application.
Next chapter introduces the methodology in two steps, including calibration of history data
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and real-time recognition of waterlogging. Chapter 3 describes how the method was applied in
Shenzhen and then the analysis and comparison. The last chapter is to summarize the whole
method and potential further work as well.

2. METHODOLOGY

2.1 Problem formulation

Assuming denotes the probability of a road waterlogging event occurring. The
goal of method is to estimate the conditional probability given the rain event . As
known, the density-speed data point under the bottom of density-speed FD also called as
singularity in mathematics terminology represents the decreasing in road capacity which can be
caused by traffic accidents or waterlogging etc. In other words, the occurrence of waterlogging
can be identified by appearance of singularity in density-speed FD. Assuming denotes the
event that there are number of consecutive singularities in density-speed FD. Therefore, the
goal is to seek given and occurring.
However, it is impractical to directly estimate since waterlogging is a minor
probability, which can be statistically obtained according to the Bayes formula.

According to theory that road capacity decreases when waterlogging occurs, then
is definite, we can get:

As the formulation shown above, the estimation of requires the probability of

which is almost impossible to obtain. Nonetheless, a negative correlation relationship
between and can be concluded from the formulation. In terms of
practical application, it is acceptable to assume an approximate linear relationship between them
as follow:

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In this paper, intercept b and slope w is determined by tow approximate points

( , ( | ) ) and ( , ( | ) ).

Since there is no relationship between event and , can be obtained as

follow:
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To filter the sample of event for calculating , a threshold is proposed.

Waterlogging will cause road capacity decreases for a long time. When the number of
consecutive singularities in density-speed FD is less than , it means waterlogging did not
happen. Based on empirical practices, is set to 6 which gives a better accuracy in result.
Finally, we get the sample of event and eventually the probability of waterlogging.
As shown in Fig. 1 below, the proposed waterlogging recognition framework consists of the
following two main steps.

Calibration based on historical data Real-time waterlogging recognition

Inputting real-time data

Bus，navigation GPS
data
Whether rains

Y
Data pre-processing

Whether there is singularity

FD model construction
Y

Whether the number of consecutive

singularities more than m
Singularity definition

N Y

calculating Estimating waterlogging Setting high waterlogging

based on threshold m probability based on probability

Introducing rainfall
correction coefficient

Getting waterlogging
probability

Fig. 1. Waterlogging recognition framework

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(i) Density-speed FD construction and calculation of road segment based

on previous month of data.
(ii) Online waterlogging probability estimation based on number of consecutive singularities,
rainfall correction factor, and calibrated parameters.

2.2 Calibration based on history data

a) Density-speed FD construction
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In general road traffic researches, especially on highway, the density and speed of traffic
flow which used as the most ideal and common training data to construct FD can be captured by
roadside detectors. However, there are only a small number of roads equipped with detectors in
Shenzhen which cannot provide enough datasets for FD construction. Luckily, a great number of
vehicles position data collected from Global Position System (GPS) can be used to estimate
traffic density and speed instead. Therefore, the construction of density-speed FD for each road
segment in this paper consists of the following three steps with the usage of GPS data: (i)Road
traffic speed calculation; (ii)Road traffic density estimation; (iii)Density-speed FD verification.
(i) Road traffic speed calculation
Different from aggregate data captured by detectors, the GPS data is more suitable for urban
traffic behaviors analysis due to its universality and high frequency. Generally, the basic content
of GPS records contains license plate, update time, vehicle speed, longitude, latitude, etc. To
calculate traffic speed on each road, a map-matching operation is needed for casting vehicles
GPS into geographically close road segments.

y
b1 l B ( xb , yb )

d
A( xa , ya ) b2

x
Fig. 2. Illustration of road segment in geographic coordinates

Fig. 2 illustrates an example of a road segment in geographic coordinates. Let ( ) and

( ) denote the position of road begin node A and end node B respectively. Provided with
road width , upper bounds , and lower bounds , the road geographic information can be
represented as line functions obtained by translating the middle-dashed line which through
node and node as follow,

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Where θ denotes the angle between road line and horizontal axis. By this way, a GPS point is
considered as locating in certain road segment if it is between the road’s upper bound and lower
bound.
After each GPS point being matched to the nearest road segment, the A-Star algorithm is
performed to create the whole trajectory of each vehicle based on vehicle plate and update time.
By this means, each road segment can get the vehicle’s sub trajectory represented as running
length and running time. Running length calculates the distance between the first and last GPS
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record while running time calculates the duration difference for each vehicle on one road
segment. Along this way, the road speed can be extracted as the running speed derived
from the result of dividing total length and total duration of all vehicle
running on road segment at time period .

(ii) Road traffic density estimation

Here the formulation proposed by Edie is used to estimate the road density as follow,

where and denote the length of road and the time interval respectively. In this
paper is set to 5 minutes.
Moreover, a linear smoothing strategy is applied to weaken the influence of noise data as
follow.

̂ ̂

where and ̂ denote the road speed or density before and after smoothing
respectively. is a smoothing factor and set to 0.3
(iii) Density-speed FD verification
Fig. 3 illustrate an example of FD derived from bus GPS data and navigation vehicle GPS
data for certain road segment. An obvious difference can be observed to distinguish the situation
under the waterlogging and non-waterlogging. Therefore, it is reasonable to find out the
probability of waterlogging on the observation of consecutive data points located under the
bottom of density-speed FD.

b) Singularity definition
Here is a man-made rule adopted to define the singularity in density-speed FD which is
considered as the indicator of waterlogging event. In FD of each road segment, density-partitions
are averagely divided into 10 according to the maximum observed density. In each
density-partition, the observed point with speed value below the speed of 90% quantile partition
is considered as a singularity.

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10 12

8 10
speed(m/s)

speed/(m/s)
8
6
6
4
4
2 2
0 0
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0 2 4 6 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
density(veh/km) density/(veh/km)

Fig. 3. FD relationship of certain road segment (The squar points are observed
under waterlogging situtaion)

c) calculation
Finally, the probability is estimated as the frequency of event . Comparing
all the density-speed points in dataset from previous month to the road’s FD and count the
number of days when event occurred. Using formula below to determine .

Where means number of days when event occurred. means total number of
days in previous month.

2.3 Real-time waterlogging recognition

a) Rainfall correction factor definition
As we all known, the waterlogging issues are strongly related to the intensity of rainfall (You
FC et al., 2013), which means a waterlogging issue will never occur without rainfall. That’s why
a rainfall correction factor is adopted to improve the waterlogging probability estimation under
different intensity of rainfall. According to the records on table 1, a rainfall correction factor
is determined as follow.

is an indicator to distinguish torrential rain ( is larger than 18mm), heavy rain ( is

between 8mm and 18mm), moderate rain ( is between 2.5mm and 8mm), and light rain ( is
less than 2.5mm).

Table 1. The number of reported waterlogging issues under different level of rainfall in
Shenzhen.

Rainfall level Torrential rain Heavy rain Moderate rain Light rain No rain
Number of issues 31 24 0 0 0

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b) Real-time waterlogging probability estimation

As online application, the real-time waterlogging is estimated as follow.
Step 1: Calculating the series of traffic speed and density of each road segment with real-time
GPS data collected from vehicles.
Step 2: Counting the number of consecutive singularities of each road segment and check
whether the number over threshold . If so, go to Step 3 otherwise jump to Step 4.
Step 3: Setting the probability to 0.9 and jump to Step 5.
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Step 4: Calculating the probability based on .

Step 5: Modifying the waterlogging probability with rainfall correction factor .

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The proposed method is applied in Shenzhen to recognize and analyze waterlogged roads
within whole city. Shenzhen always suffers from various levels of road waterlogging during
flood season. There are 30 waterlogging points collected from the media on April 20, 2019 and
15 points on May 23, 2019 respectively which are used as benchmarks to test the accuracy of
proposed method.
The previous month of GPS data based on April 20 and May 23 are collected and used to
proceed the calibration. As shown in Table 2 below, there are about 6 billion rows mobile
navigation GPS data and 40 million rows bus GPS data from 139,367 road segments per day. In
addition, the method uses meteorological data collected from each 1km width grid area in
Shenzhen to calculate the correction factor of rainfall in every road segment.

Table. 2 Data feature and structure

Dataset Data feature Data field

Quantity: 40 million rows per day License plate, update
Bus GPS data Sampling frequency: 15s time, speed, longitude,
Number of vehicles: 10 thousand latitude.
Quantity: 6 billion rows per day License plate, update
Navigation GPS
Sampling frequency: 1s time, speed, longitude,
data
Number of vehicles: 100 thousand latitude.
Number of roads: 139367
Road network data ID, length, direction.
Average length: 114m
Number of grids: 1549
Period, rainfall per
Meteorological data Quantity: 450 thousand rows per
hour, grid ID
day

After finishing calibration which is introduced in chapter 2 section 2 based on history GPS
data, the process continues inputting data (GPS and meteorological data on April 20 and May 23)
into the calculation of waterlogging probability for a single road segment which is mentioned in
chapter 2 section 3, and it takes 3 minutes to update results of all road segments for each iteration
in a period of 5 minutes.

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3.1 Threshold determination

A probability threshold is proposed to determine whether the road is waterlogged or not.
When the probability of waterlogging exceeds the threshold value, then this road is recognized as
a waterlogging point. After that, we get a recognition value by counting all waterlogging points
in total.
The probability threshold needs be evaluated and determined in order to effectively identify
as many correct waterlogging points as possible. In fact, we cannot collect all waterlogged roads
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through media, so the threshold is determined with the goal of making more matched
benchmarks value and less recognition value in result. According to result of May 23, the values
of waterlogging recognition and matched benchmarks change with different probability
thresholds which are shown in Fig. 4.

75 13

value of benchmarks get matched

waterlogging identification value

65 12

55 11

45 10

35 waterlogging 9
identification value
25 value of benchmarks 8
get matched
15 7
0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 0.55 0.6 0.65 0.7 0.75 0.8 0.85 0.9
probability threshold

Fig. 4. value of waterlogging recognition and benchmarks get matched

Using formula below to calculate the probability threshold .

( )

where represents the optimal probability threshold. and respectively represents

the value of benchmarks get matched and value of waterlogging recognition when the probability
threshold is . means the probability threshold when the matched benchmarks value is the
largest correspond to the minimum value of waterlogging recognition. According to the formula,
the threshold value was 0.7.

3.2 Result analysis

When probability threshold is set to 0.7, the numbers of recognized waterlogging points on
April 20 and May 23 are 65 and 28, of which there are respectively 24 and 11 matched
benchmarks (shown in Fig.5&Fig.6). The benchmarks on April 20 and May 23 are 30 and 15, so
the accuracy of waterlogging recognition on April 20 and May 23 reach 80.00% and 73.33%.

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Those recognition results satisfy the engineering application and reflect the traffic capacity drop
issues causing relevant departments' strong concern.
The FD model of the road segments with the missing recognition point was checked, which
found that no data points fluctuated near the lower boundary of the model, indicating that
although there was waterlogging in these road segments, however, the influence on the road
capacity was relatively slight, and the road traffic flow was not affected.
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Fig. 5. Waterlogging recognized by algorithm on 20. April (rainfall are concentrated on

Northwest of Shenzhen as the figure shown; waterlogging points recognized with a certain
distance from the actual position due to the recognition method based on road segment ;
waterlogging in intersection will cause several road segments be recognized as
‘waterlogging’, these road segments are consider as one waterlogging point)

Fig. 6. Recognized waterlogging points on 23. May with the entire city covered by rainfall 6
and 4 waterlogging points were missed in the results on April 20 and May 23, respectively.

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3.3 Result comparison

To make a comparison, we apply another method proposed by Liu et al under the same
circumstance. His method recognizes whether the road is flooded simply based on changes of
traffic volume and speed. The comparison of two methods are shown in Table 3, in which we
can see that Liu’s method provides results of 93 and 32 recognized waterlogging points on April
20 and May 23 with only 10 and 7 being matched to benchmarks respectively, while our
proposed method recognizes 65 and 28 waterlogging points on April 20 and May 23 with 24 and
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11 being successfully matched. It indicates that our method achieves a better accuracy in results.

Table.3 Comparison based on results of April 20 & May 23

Recognized The number of

method waterlogging benchmarks benchmarks get accuracy
points matched
Liu’s
93/32 30/15 10/7 33.33%/46.67%
method

Proposed
65/28 30/15 24/11 80.00%/73.33%
method

Liu’s method has a better result on May 23 than the other on April 20, which indicates that
his method is more suitable for severe waterlogging issue. Moreover, there exists many
mismatched points because of the rainfall correction factor is not applied in his method.

4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

Waterlogging will decrease road capacity, cause traffic congestion, and increase the risk of
traffic accidents. Therefore, an effective recognition method will be of great help to drivers and
pedestrians due to the early warning. In this paper, a data-driven method based on FD is
proposed to recognize road capacity decreasing caused by waterlogging. In offline calibration,
the history GPS data from vehicles are used to construct density-speed FD and calculate relevant
parameters. In online application, the real-time probabilities of waterlogging are estimated based
on real-time data and calibrated parameters. In addition, a correction coefficient between rainfall
and waterlogging is adopted to improve the results. A case study of Shenzhen waterlogging
recognition indicates the effectiveness the method has in a city scale. Moreover, the framework
and theory referred in this method are more readily comprehensible than any other waterlogging
recognition methods.
Actually, the waterlogging location identified by the proposed method has been real-timely
send to the monitoring system of Traffic Management Department and Weather Bureau in
Shenzhen respectively, which supports the precise traffic dispersion and information publish.
Moreover, the historical waterlogging location data will be used to enhance the analysis of traffic
black-spots and improve the accuracy of proposed method in the future.

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