14,777 research outputs found
Assessing the Impact of Game Day Schedule and Opponents on Travel Patterns and Route Choice using Big Data Analytics
The transportation system is crucial for transferring people and goods from point A to point B. However, its reliability can be decreased by unanticipated congestion resulting from planned special events. For example, sporting events collect large crowds of people at specific venues on game days and disrupt normal traffic patterns.
The goal of this study was to understand issues related to road traffic management during major sporting events by using widely available INRIX data to compare travel patterns and behaviors on game days against those on normal days. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on the impact of all Nebraska Cornhuskers football games over five years on traffic congestion on five major routes in Nebraska. We attempted to identify hotspots, the unusually high-risk zones in a spatiotemporal space containing traffic congestion that occur on almost all game days. For hotspot detection, we utilized a method called Multi-EigenSpot, which is able to detect multiple hotspots in a spatiotemporal space. With this algorithm, we were able to detect traffic hotspot clusters on the five chosen routes in Nebraska. After detecting the hotspots, we identified the factors affecting the sizes of hotspots and other parameters. The start time of the game and the Cornhuskers’ opponent for a given game are two important factors affecting the number of people coming to Lincoln, Nebraska, on game days. Finally, the Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) approach was applied to forecast the start times and locations of hotspot clusters in 2018 with a weighted mean absolute percentage error (WMAPE) of 13.8%
DxNAT - Deep Neural Networks for Explaining Non-Recurring Traffic Congestion
Non-recurring traffic congestion is caused by temporary disruptions, such as
accidents, sports games, adverse weather, etc. We use data related to real-time
traffic speed, jam factors (a traffic congestion indicator), and events
collected over a year from Nashville, TN to train a multi-layered deep neural
network. The traffic dataset contains over 900 million data records. The
network is thereafter used to classify the real-time data and identify
anomalous operations. Compared with traditional approaches of using statistical
or machine learning techniques, our model reaches an accuracy of 98.73 percent
when identifying traffic congestion caused by football games. Our approach
first encodes the traffic across a region as a scaled image. After that the
image data from different timestamps is fused with event- and time-related
data. Then a crossover operator is used as a data augmentation method to
generate training datasets with more balanced classes. Finally, we use the
receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to tune the sensitivity of the
classifier. We present the analysis of the training time and the inference time
separately
An Online Decision-Theoretic Pipeline for Responder Dispatch
The problem of dispatching emergency responders to service traffic accidents,
fire, distress calls and crimes plagues urban areas across the globe. While
such problems have been extensively looked at, most approaches are offline.
Such methodologies fail to capture the dynamically changing environments under
which critical emergency response occurs, and therefore, fail to be implemented
in practice. Any holistic approach towards creating a pipeline for effective
emergency response must also look at other challenges that it subsumes -
predicting when and where incidents happen and understanding the changing
environmental dynamics. We describe a system that collectively deals with all
these problems in an online manner, meaning that the models get updated with
streaming data sources. We highlight why such an approach is crucial to the
effectiveness of emergency response, and present an algorithmic framework that
can compute promising actions for a given decision-theoretic model for
responder dispatch. We argue that carefully crafted heuristic measures can
balance the trade-off between computational time and the quality of solutions
achieved and highlight why such an approach is more scalable and tractable than
traditional approaches. We also present an online mechanism for incident
prediction, as well as an approach based on recurrent neural networks for
learning and predicting environmental features that affect responder dispatch.
We compare our methodology with prior state-of-the-art and existing dispatch
strategies in the field, which show that our approach results in a reduction in
response time with a drastic reduction in computational time.Comment: Appeared in ICCPS 201
Safe Routes to School: Helping Communities Save Lives and Dollars: 2011 Policy Report
Highlights the financial and health benefits of the federal program to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists; promote healthy, active lifestyles for children; and improve environmental conditions near schools, as well as implementation issues
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