Ant Colony Optimization

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is the best example of how studies aimed at understanding and modeling the behavior of ants and other social insects can provide inspiration for the development of computational algorithms for the solution of difficult mathematical problems. Introduced by Marco Dorigo in his PhD thesis (1992) and initially applied to the travelling salesman problem, the ACO field has experienced a tremendous growth, standing today as an important nature-inspired stochastic metaheuristic for hard optimization problems. This book presents state-of-the-art ACO methods and is divided into two parts: (I) Techniques, which includes parallel implementations, and (II) Applications, where recent contributions of ACO to diverse fields, such as traffic congestion and control, structural optimization, manufacturing, and genomics are presented

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Big Data Technology and Applications in Intelligent Transportation

During the last few years, information technology and transportation industries, along with automotive manufacturers and academia, are focusing on leveraging intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to improve services related to driver experience, connected cars, Internet data plans for vehicles, traffic infrastructure, urban transportation systems, traffic collaborative management, road traffic accidents analysis, road traffic flow prediction, public transportation service plan, personal travel route plans, and the development of an effective ecosystem for vehicles, drivers, traffic controllers, city planners, and transportation applications. Moreover, the emerging technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have provided unprecedented opportunities for the development and realization of innovative intelligent transportation systems where sensors and mobile devices can gather information and cloud computing, allowing knowledge discovery, information sharing, and supported decision making. However, the development of such data-driven ITS requires the integration, processing, and analysis of plentiful information obtained from millions of vehicles, traffic infrastructures, smartphones, and other collaborative systems like weather stations and road safety and early warning systems. The huge amount of data generated by ITS devices is only of value if utilized in data analytics for decision-making such as accident prevention and detection, controlling road risks, reducing traffic carbon emissions, and other applications which bring big data analytics into the picture

Prediction-based Decentralized Routing Algorithm

We introduce a new efficient routing algorithm called Prediction-based Decentralized Routing algorithm (PDR), which is based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristics. In our approach, an ant uses a combination of the link state information and the predicted link load instead of the ant's trip time to determine the amount of pheromone to deposit. A Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) is used to build adaptive traffic predictors which capture the actual traffic behaviour. We study two performance parameters: the rejection ratio and the percentage of accepted bandwidth under two different network load conditions. We show that our algorithm reduces the rejection ratio of requests and achieves a higher throughput when compared to Shortest Path First and Widest Shortest Path algorithms

Analysis and Forecast of Railway Freight Volume based on Prophet-Deep AR Model

The research on railway freight volume forecast is of great significance to the allocation of railway freight transport resources, the formulation of transport plans and the organization of railway freight transport. This study, by fully mining the railway freight ticket data information, put forward the precise forecast model of railway freight volume under different types of freight. Firstly, the railway freight ticket data are cleaned, regulated and integrated, and the time series of the daily number of railway freight trains are constructed, get the trend, periodicity and holiday data of railway traffic data, and set the parameters of Chinese holidays and rest days according to the demand characteristics of different categories. Secondly, the forecasting result of the Prophet is taken as a cooperative parameter. DeepAR is used to forecast, and a combined model of the Prophet-DeepAR is constructed. Finally, the combined model was validated with Shanghai Railway Bureau data from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018 for the food and tobacco category, and with Prophet-DeepAR, LSTM, Wavelet, BILSTM, and Prophet-LSTM, prophet-wavelet and Prophet-Bilstm are used to compare the prediction results. The results show that the Prophet-DeepAR model can extract the multi-dimensional periodicity of freight traffic and mine the trend information of freight traffic, and get the prediction result with high precision. It has better accuracy than other models