Recent advancements in intelligent transportation systems and data analytics within transportation systems present a significant opportunity to enhance operational efficiency. In this context, the pivotal role of intelligent agents in achieving real-time optimisation for traffic management is highlighted. Such agents can predict and decide autonomously and can be trained to understand the underlying complexities of the traffic in real-time. In this paper, an innovative framework to perform real-time traffic optimal management decisions is proposed. Its rationale uses a fusion of data observations and simulation to enable an autonomous agent capable of accurate adaptive traffic management. A Case Study of application is developed using the M50 motorway in Dublin, where the speed limits are applied as adaptive parameters for optimal traffic management. Results show that the intelligent agent can autonomously predict travel times and decide in real-time the optimal speed limits to impose on a motorway when signs of congestion are found. The agent can reduce the mean travel time of a time interval by up to 55 % and the mean waiting time by up to 69 % in a situation of congestion. The average travel times of the studied M50 junction have significantly improved, showing the potential of autonomous agents in enhancing real-time optimal traffic management.

Travel-time prediction is a critical component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), offering vital information for tasks such as accident detection, congestion management, and traffic flow optimisation. Accurate predictions are highly dependent on the selection of relevant features. In this study, a two-stage methodology is proposed which consists of two layers of Optimisation Algorithm and one Data-Driven method (OA2DD) to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of travel-time prediction. The first stage involves an offline process where interconnected optimisation algorithms are employed to identify the optimal set of features and determine the most effective machine learning model architecture. In the second stage, the real-time process utilises the optimised model to predict travel times using new data from previously unseen parts of the dataset. The proposed OA2DD method was applied to a case study on the M50 motorway in Dublin. Results show that OA2DD improves the convergence curve and reduces the number of selected features by up to 50 %, leading to a 56 % reduction in computational costs. Furthermore, using the selected features from OA2DD, reduced the prediction error by up to 29 % compared to the full feature set and other feature selection methods, demonstrating the method's effectiveness and robustness.