Advancing Urban Planning with Deep Learning: Intelligent Traffic Flow Prediction and Optimization for Smart Cities

The accelerating pace of urbanization has significantly complicated traffic management systems, leading to mounting challenges, such as persistent congestion, increased travel delays, and heightened environmental impacts. In response to these challenges, this study presents a novel deep learning framework designed to enhance short-term traffic flow prediction and support intelligent transportation systems within the context of smart cities. The proposed model integrates Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, augmented by an attention mechanism that dynamically emphasizes relevant temporal patterns. The model was rigorously evaluated using the publicly available datasets and demonstrated substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the proposed framework achieves a 3.75% reduction in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), a 2.00% reduction in the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and a 4.17% reduction in the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) compared to the baseline models. The enhanced predictive accuracy and computational efficiency offer significant benefits for intelligent traffic control, dynamic route planning, and proactive congestion management, thereby contributing to the development of more sustainable and efficient urban mobility systems.