Trip Prediction by Leveraging Trip Histories from Neighboring Users

We propose a novel approach for trip prediction by analyzing user's trip histories. We augment users' (self-) trip histories by adding 'similar' trips from other users, which could be informative and useful for predicting future trips for a given user. This also helps to cope with noisy or sparse trip histories, where the self-history by itself does not provide a reliable prediction of future trips. We show empirical evidence that by enriching the users' trip histories with additional trips, one can improve the prediction error by 15%-40%, evaluated on multiple subsets of the Nancy2012 dataset. This real-world dataset is collected from public transportation ticket validations in the city of Nancy, France. Our prediction tool is a central component of a trip simulator system designed to analyze the functionality of public transportation in the city of Nancy

A novel Big Data analytics and intelligent technique to predict driver's intent

Modern age offers a great potential for automatically predicting the driver's intent through the increasing miniaturization of computing technologies, rapid advancements in communication technologies and continuous connectivity of heterogeneous smart objects. Inside the cabin and engine of modern cars, dedicated computer systems need to possess the ability to exploit the wealth of information generated by heterogeneous data sources with different contextual and conceptual representations. Processing and utilizing this diverse and voluminous data, involves many challenges concerning the design of the computational technique used to perform this task. In this paper, we investigate the various data sources available in the car and the surrounding environment, which can be utilized as inputs in order to predict driver's intent and behavior. As part of investigating these potential data sources, we conducted experiments on e-calendars for a large number of employees, and have reviewed a number of available geo referencing systems. Through the results of a statistical analysis and by computing location recognition accuracy results, we explored in detail the potential utilization of calendar location data to detect the driver's intentions. In order to exploit the numerous diverse data inputs available in modern vehicles, we investigate the suitability of different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, and propose a novel fuzzy computational modelling methodology. Finally, we outline the impact of applying advanced CI and Big Data analytics techniques in modern vehicles on the driver and society in general, and discuss ethical and legal issues arising from the deployment of intelligent self-learning cars

Predictive analytics for enhancing travel time estimation in navigation apps of Apple, Google, and Microsoft

The explosive growth of the location-enabled devices coupled with the increasing use of Internet services has led to an increasing awareness of the importance and usage of geospatial information in many applications. The mobile navigation apps (often called “Maps”), use a variety of available data sources to calculate and predict the travel time for different modes. This paper evaluates the pedestrian mode of Maps apps in three major smartphone operating systems (Android, iOS and Windows Phone). We will demonstrate that the Maps apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone in pedestrian mode, predict travel time without learning from the individual’s movement profile. Then, we will exemplify that those apps suffer from a specific data quality issue (the absence of information about location and type of pedestrian crossings). Finally, we will illustrate learning from movement profile of individuals using predictive analytics models to improve the accuracy of travel time estimation for each user (personalization)

Sustainable Travel Incentives Optimization in Multimodal Networks

Tripod, an integrated bi-level transportation management system, is a smartphone application from the potential user’s point of view which would be instantly accessed prior to performing the trip. Since there are constantly several alternatives for any trip, Tripod considers a series and combination of various parameters, including departure time, mode and route, and rewards for each alternative with a number of redeemable points for goods and services called “Tokens”. The framework responsible for computing the optimized number of tokens awarded to the set of available alternatives in order to minimize the system-wide energy consumption under a constrained Token budget, is the System Optimization (SO) implemented in Tripod. To do so, a higher number of tokens would be awarded to the alternatives, guaranteeing a larger energy saving, less energy consumption, alternatively. SO is multimodal whereby public transit, private car, carpooling, etc. are being considered as the potential travel modes. Furthermore, SO is dynamic, predictive and personalized: the same alternative is rewarded differently, depending on the current and predicted future condition of the network and on the individual’s profile. In order to solve this problem, a multimodal simulation-based optimization model will be elaborated