Abstract

Real-time road accident prediction under dynamic climatic conditions remains a critical challenge for intelligent transportation systems, especially in peripheral and rural regions with limited communication infrastructure. This study proposes and evaluates a comprehensive five-layer cyber–physical architecture based on Federated Edge Intelligence to enable climate-aware spatiotemporal road accident prediction across the 24 provinces of Ecuador. The framework integrates low-power IoT sensing nodes equipped with TinyML capabilities (ESP32-S3), long-range LoRaWAN (Long-Range Wide-Area Network) communication networks, containerized edge–cloud orchestration via OpenNebula and K3s, a decentralized Federated Learning ecosystem using the FedAvg algorithm, and a geospatial decision intelligence backend. Leveraging a nationwide multi-source dataset spanning the 2014–2025 period with 27,620 processed records, the architecture successfully handles highly skewed historical accident profiles optimized through a Box–Cox transformation. Empirical results demonstrate that the centralized Stacking ensemble achieves the highest overall baseline performance (R2=0.2460,MAE=0.4748) in the Box–Cox transformed space. In the decentralized environment, the federated Gradient Boosting implementation establishes a resilient and viable accuracy trade-off (14.51% increase in MAE) while strictly maintaining localized data sovereignty and compliance with personal data protection legislation. Operationally, the edge nodes achieve a localized inference latency of only 78ms, well below the critical 200ms safety threshold, while the global aggregation engine exhibits rapid convergence within just three communication rounds. This cyber–physical ecosystem proves that combining localized TinyML inference with federated aggregation provides a scalable, low-latency, and privacy-preserving foundation for next-generation climate-aware road safety infrastructures in connectivity-constrained environments.

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