Forecasting bus passenger flows by using a clustering-based support vector regression approach

As a significant component of the intelligent transportation system, forecasting bus passenger flows plays a key role in resource allocation, network planning, and frequency setting. However, it remains challenging to recognize high fluctuations, nonlinearity, and periodicity of bus passenger flows due to varied destinations and departure times. For this reason, a novel forecasting model named as affinity propagation-based support vector regression (AP-SVR) is proposed based on clustering and nonlinear simulation. For the addressed approach, a clustering algorithm is first used to generate clustering-based intervals. A support vector regression (SVR) is then exploited to forecast the passenger flow for each cluster, with the use of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for obtaining the optimized parameters. Finally, the prediction results of the SVR are rearranged by chronological order rearrangement. The proposed model is tested using real bus passenger data from a bus line over four months. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than other peer models in terms of absolute percentage error and mean absolute percentage error. It is recommended that the deterministic clustering technique with stable cluster results (AP) can improve the forecasting performance significantly.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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

Analysis on predict model of railway passenger travel factors judgment with soft-computing methods

Purpose: With the development of the transportation, more traveling factors acting on the railway passengers change greatly with the passengers’ choice. With the help of the modern information computing technology, the factors were integrated to realize quantitative analyze according to the travel purpose and travel cost. Design/methodology/approach: The detailed comparative study was implemented with comparing the two soft-computing methods: genetic algorithm, BP neural network. The two methods with different idea were also studied in this model to discuss the key parameter setting and its applicable range. Findings: During the study, the data about the railway passengers is difficult to analyzed detailed because of the inaccurate information. There are still many factors to affect the choice of passengers. Research limitations/implications: The model-designing thought and its computing procession were also certificated with programming and data illustration according to thorough analysis. The comparative analysis was also proved effective and applicable to predict the railway passengers’ travel choice through the empirical study with soft-computing supporting. Practical implications: The techniques of predicting and parameters’ choice were conducted with algorithm-operation supporting. Originality/value: The detail form comparative study in this paper could be provided for researchers and managers and be applied in the practice according the actual demand.Peer Reviewe

A deep learning approach towards railway safety risk assessment

Railway stations are essential aspects of railway systems, and they play a vital role in public daily life. Various types of AI technology have been utilised in many fields to ensure the safety of people and their assets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses computer vision and pattern recognition to perform risk management in railway systems in which a convolutional neural network (CNN) is applied as a supervised machine learning model to identify risks. However, risk management in railway stations is challenging because stations feature dynamic and complex conditions. Despite extensive efforts by industry associations and researchers to reduce the number of accidents and injuries in this field, such incidents still occur. The proposed model offers a beneficial method for obtaining more accurate motion data, and it detects adverse conditions as soon as possible by capturing fall, slip and trip (FST) events in the stations that represent high-risk outcomes. The framework of the presented method is generalisable to a wide range of locations and to additional types of risks

Advances in Public Transport Platform for the Development of Sustainability Cities

Modern societies demand high and varied mobility, which in turn requires a complex transport system adapted to social needs that guarantees the movement of people and goods in an economically efficient and safe way, but all are subject to a new environmental rationality and the new logic of the paradigm of sustainability. From this perspective, an efficient and flexible transport system that provides intelligent and sustainable mobility patterns is essential to our economy and our quality of life. The current transport system poses growing and significant challenges for the environment, human health, and sustainability, while current mobility schemes have focused much more on the private vehicle that has conditioned both the lifestyles of citizens and cities, as well as urban and territorial sustainability. Transport has a very considerable weight in the framework of sustainable development due to environmental pressures, associated social and economic effects, and interrelations with other sectors. The continuous growth that this sector has experienced over the last few years and its foreseeable increase, even considering the change in trends due to the current situation of generalized crisis, make the challenge of sustainable transport a strategic priority at local, national, European, and global levels. This Special Issue will pay attention to all those research approaches focused on the relationship between evolution in the area of transport with a high incidence in the environment from the perspective of efficiency

Utilizing an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) for overcrowding level risk assessment in railway stations

The railway network plays a significant role (both economically and socially) in assisting the reduction of urban traffic congestion. It also accelerates the decarbonization in cities, societies and built environments. To ensure the safe and secure operation of stations and capture the real-time risk status, it is imperative to consider a dynamic and smart method for managing risk factors in stations. In this research, a framework to develop an intelligent system for managing risk is suggested. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is proposed as a powerful, intelligently selected model to improve risk management and manage uncertainties in risk variables. The objective of this study is twofold. First, we review current methods applied to predict the risk level in the flow. Second, we develop smart risk assessment and management measures (or indicators) to improve our understanding of the safety of railway stations in real-time. Two parameters are selected as input for the risk level relating to overcrowding: the transfer efficiency and retention rate of the platform. This study is the world’s first to establish the hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) model, which has the potency to manage risk uncertainties and learns through artificial neural networks (ANNs) by integrated training processes. The prediction result shows very high accuracy in predicting the risk level performance, and proves the AI model capabilities to learn, to make predictions, and to capture risk level values in real time. Such risk information is extremely critical for decision making processes in managing safety and risks, especially when uncertain disruptions incur (e.g., COVID-19, disasters, etc.). The novel insights stemmed from this study will lead to more effective and efficient risk management for single and clustered railway station facilities towards safer, smarter, and more resilient transportation systems

Representation Learning of public transport data. Application to event detection

5th International Workshop and Symposium TransitData 2019, Paris, France, 08-/07/2019 - 10/07/2019On the basis of data collected by counting sensors deployed on trains, this paper deals with a forecasting of passenger load in public transport taking into account train operation. Providing passengers with train load forecasting, in addition to the expected arrival time of the next train, can indeed be useful for a better planning of their journeys, which can prevent over-crowding situations in the trains [6] [7]. The proposed approach is built on both a hierarchy of recurrent neural networks [8] and representation learning [9] with the aim to explore the ability of such mobility data processing to simultaneously perform a forecasting task and highlight the impact of events on the public transport operation and demand. An event refers here to an unexpected passenger transport activity or to a modification in transport operation compared to those corresponding to normal conditions. Two kind of historical data are used, namely train load data and automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. This latter source contains all information related to the train operation (delay, time of arrival/departure of vehicles ...). The proposed methodology is applied on a railway transit network line operated by the French railway company SNCF in the suburban of Paris. The historical dataset used in the experiments covers the period from 2015 to 2016

Applications of Genetic Algorithm and Its Variants in Rail Vehicle Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis and Comprehensive Review

Railway systems are time-varying and complex systems with nonlinear behaviors that require effective optimization techniques to achieve optimal performance. Evolutionary algorithms methods have emerged as a popular optimization technique in recent years due to their ability to handle complex, multi-objective issues of such systems. In this context, genetic algorithm (GA) as one of the powerful optimization techniques has been extensively used in the railway sector, and applied to various problems such as scheduling, routing, forecasting, design, maintenance, and allocation. This paper presents a review of the applications of GAs and their variants in the railway domain together with bibliometric analysis. The paper covers highly cited and recent studies that have employed GAs in the railway sector and discuss the challenges and opportunities of using GAs in railway optimization problems. Meanwhile, the most popular hybrid GAs as the combination of GA and other evolutionary algorithms methods such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), neural network (NN), fuzzy-logic control, etc with their dedicated application in the railway domain are discussed too. More than 250 publications are listed and classified to provide a comprehensive analysis and road map for experts and researchers in the field helping them to identify research gaps and opportunities

Online Predictive Optimization Framework for Stochastic Demand-Responsive Transit Services

This study develops an online predictive optimization framework for dynamically operating a transit service in an area of crowd movements. The proposed framework integrates demand prediction and supply optimization to periodically redesign the service routes based on recently observed demand. To predict demand for the service, we use Quantile Regression to estimate the marginal distribution of movement counts between each pair of serviced locations. The framework then combines these marginals into a joint demand distribution by constructing a Gaussian copula, which captures the structure of correlation between the marginals. For supply optimization, we devise a linear programming model, which simultaneously determines the route structure and the service frequency according to the predicted demand. Importantly, our framework both preserves the uncertainty structure of future demand and leverages this for robust route optimization, while keeping both components decoupled. We evaluate our framework using a real-world case study of autonomous mobility in a university campus in Denmark. The results show that our framework often obtains the ground truth optimal solution, and can outperform conventional methods for route optimization, which do not leverage full predictive distributions.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, 5 table