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

Estimating Movement from Mobile Telephony Data

Mobile enabled devices are ubiquitous in modern society. The information gathered by their normal service operations has become one of the primary data sources used in the understanding of human mobility, social connection and information transfer. This thesis investigates techniques that can extract useful information from anonymised call detail records (CDR). CDR consist of mobile subscriber data related to people in connection with the network operators, the nature of their communication activity (voice, SMS, data, etc.), duration of the activity and starting time of the activity and servicing cell identification numbers of both the sender and the receiver when available. The main contributions of the research are a methodology for distance measurements which enables the identification of mobile subscriber travel paths and a methodology for population density estimation based on significant mobile subscriber regions of interest. In addition, insights are given into how a mobile network operator may use geographically located subscriber data to create new revenue streams and improved network performance. A range of novel algorithms and techniques underpin the development of these methodologies. These include, among others, techniques for CDR feature extraction, data visualisation and CDR data cleansing. The primary data source used in this body of work was the CDR of Meteor, a mobile network operator in the Republic of Ireland. The Meteor network under investigation has just over 1 million customers, which represents approximately a quarter of the country’s 4.6 million inhabitants, and operates using both 2G and 3G cellular telephony technologies. Results show that the steady state vector analysis of modified Markov chain mobility models can return population density estimates comparable to population estimates obtained through a census. Evaluated using a test dataset, results of travel path identification showed that developed distance measurements achieved greater accuracy when classifying the routes CDR journey trajectories took compared to traditional trajectory distance measurements. Results from subscriber segmentation indicate that subscribers who have perceived similar relationships to geographical features can be grouped based on weighted steady state mobility vectors. Overall, this thesis proposes novel algorithms and techniques for the estimation of movement from mobile telephony data addressing practical issues related to sampling, privacy and spatial uncertainty

Advances in crowd analysis for urban applications through urban event detection

The recent expansion of pervasive computing technology has contributed with novel means to pursue human activities in urban space. The urban dynamics unveiled by these means generate an enormous amount of data. These data are mainly endowed by portable and radio-frequency devices, transportation systems, video surveillance, satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, and social networking services. This has opened a new avenue of opportunities, to understand and predict urban dynamics in detail, and plan various real-time services and applications in response to that. Over the last decade, certain aspects of the crowd, e.g., mobility, sentimental, size estimation and behavioral, have been analyzed in detail and the outcomes have been reported. This paper mainly conducted an extensive survey on various data sources used for different urban applications, the state-of-the-art on urban data generation techniques and associated processing methods in order to demonstrate their merits and capabilities. Then, available open-access crowd data sets for urban event detection are provided along with relevant application programming interfaces. In addition, an outlook on a support system for urban application is provided which fuses data from all the available pervasive technology sources and finally, some open challenges and promising research directions are outlined

Cycling network discontinuities and their effects on cyclist behaviour and safety

RÉSUMÉ: Le cyclisme est généralement considéré comme le mode de transport le plus dangereux, car les collisions avec des véhicules sont plus susceptibles de provoquer des blessures graves et même la mort que les autres usagers de la route à l’exception des piétons. Compte tenu de ses nombreux avantages environnementaux et sociaux, les villes encouragent le cyclisme en tant que mode de transport abordable et développent leur infrastructure cyclable.----------ABSTRACT: Cycling is widely considered to be the riskiest mode of transport since collisions with vehicles are more likely to result in serious injuries or even death than other road users except pedestrians. Given its many environmental and social benefits, cities are encouraging cycling as an affordable mode of transport and are expanding their cycling infrastructure. While cities are aiming to increase cycling mode share, their alarming safety statistics have compelled transportation researchers and planners as well as city officials and decision makers to invest resources in designing, implementing and improving the cycling network to safely accommodate cyclists

Traffic Prediction using Artificial Intelligence: Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Opportunities

Traffic prediction plays a crucial role in alleviating traffic congestion which represents a critical problem globally, resulting in negative consequences such as lost hours of additional travel time and increased fuel consumption. Integrating emerging technologies into transportation systems provides opportunities for improving traffic prediction significantly and brings about new research problems. In order to lay the foundation for understanding the open research challenges in traffic prediction, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of traffic prediction methodologies. Specifically, we focus on the recent advances and emerging research opportunities in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based traffic prediction methods, due to their recent success and potential in traffic prediction, with an emphasis on multivariate traffic time series modeling. We first provide a list and explanation of the various data types and resources used in the literature. Next, the essential data preprocessing methods within the traffic prediction context are categorized, and the prediction methods and applications are subsequently summarized. Lastly, we present primary research challenges in traffic prediction and discuss some directions for future research.Comment: Published in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (TR_C), Volume 145, 202

Analyse et détection des trajectoires d'approches atypiques des aéronefs à l'aide de l'analyse de données fonctionnelles et de l'apprentissage automatique

L'amélioration de la sécurité aérienne implique généralement l'identification, la détection et la gestion des événements indésirables qui peuvent conduire à des événements finaux mortels. De précédentes études menées par la DSAC, l'autorité de surveillance française, ont permis d'identifier les approches non-conformes présentant des déviations par rapport aux procédures standards comme des événements indésirables. Cette thèse vise à explorer les techniques de l'analyse de données fonctionnelles et d'apprentissage automatique afin de fournir des algorithmes permettant la détection et l'analyse de trajectoires atypiques en approche à partir de données sol. Quatre axes de recherche sont abordés. Le premier axe vise à développer un algorithme d'analyse post-opérationnel basé sur des techniques d'analyse de données fonctionnelles et d'apprentissage non-supervisé pour la détection de comportements atypiques en approche. Le modèle sera confronté à l'analyse des bureaux de sécurité des vols des compagnies aériennes, et sera appliqué dans le contexte particulier de la période COVID-19 pour illustrer son utilisation potentielle alors que le système global ATM est confronté à une crise. Le deuxième axe de recherche s'intéresse plus particulièrement à la génération et à l'extraction d'informations à partir de données radar à l'aide de nouvelles techniques telles que l'apprentissage automatique. Ces méthodologies permettent d'améliorer la compréhension et l'analyse des trajectoires, par exemple dans le cas de l'estimation des paramètres embarqués à partir des paramètres radar. Le troisième axe, propose de nouvelles techniques de manipulation et de génération de données en utilisant le cadre de l'analyse de données fonctionnelles. Enfin, le quatrième axe se concentre sur l'extension en temps réel de l'algorithme post-opérationnel grâce à l'utilisation de techniques de contrôle optimal, donnant des pistes vers de nouveaux systèmes d'alerte permettant une meilleure conscience de la situation.Improving aviation safety generally involves identifying, detecting and managing undesirable events that can lead to final events with fatalities. Previous studies conducted by the French National Supervisory Authority have led to the identification of non-compliant approaches presenting deviation from standard procedures as undesirable events. This thesis aims to explore functional data analysis and machine learning techniques in order to provide algorithms for the detection and analysis of atypical trajectories in approach from ground side. Four research directions are being investigated. The first axis aims to develop a post-op analysis algorithm based on functional data analysis techniques and unsupervised learning for the detection of atypical behaviours in approach. The model is confronted with the analysis of airline flight safety offices, and is applied in the particular context of the COVID-19 crisis to illustrate its potential use while the global ATM system is facing a standstill. The second axis of research addresses the generation and extraction of information from radar data using new techniques such as Machine Learning. These methodologies allow to \mbox{improve} the understanding and the analysis of trajectories, for example in the case of the estimation of on-board parameters from radar parameters. The third axis proposes novel data manipulation and generation techniques using the functional data analysis framework. Finally, the fourth axis focuses on extending the post-operational algorithm into real time with the use of optimal control techniques, giving directions to new situation awareness alerting systems

Analysis of Trajectories by Preserving Structural Information

The analysis of trajectories from traffic data is an established and yet fast growing area of research in the related fields of Geo-analytics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It has a broad range of applications that impact lives of millions of people, e.g., in urban planning, transportation and navigation systems and localized search methods. Most of these applications share some underlying basic tasks which are related to matching, clustering and classification of trajectories. And, these tasks in turn share some underlying problems, i.e., dealing with the noisy and variable length spatio-temporal sequences in the wild. In our view, these problems can be handled in a better manner by exploiting the spatio-temporal relationships (or structural information) in sampled trajectory points that remain considerably unharmed during the measurement process. Although, the usage of such structural information has allowed breakthroughs in other fields related to the analysis of complex data sets [18], surprisingly, there is no existing approach in trajectory analysis that looks at this structural information in a unified way across multiple tasks. In this thesis, we build upon these observations and give a unified treatment of structural information in order to improve trajectory analysis tasks. This treatment explores for the first time that sequences, graphs, and kernels are common to machine learning and geo-analytics. This common language allows to pool the corresponding methods and knowledge to help solving the challenges raised by the ever growing amount of movement data by developing new analysis models and methods. This is illustrated in several ways. For example, we introduce new problem settings, distance functions and a visualization scheme in the area of trajectory analysis. We also connect the broad fild of kernel methods to the analysis of trajectories, and, we strengthen and revisit the link between biological sequence methods and analysis of trajectories. Finally, the results of our experiments show that - by incorporating the structural information - our methods improve over state-of-the-art in the focused tasks, i.e., map matching, clustering and traffic event detection

Incorporation of micro-level analysis in strategic urban transport modelling: with a case study of the Greater Beijing

Many developing countries and regions are suffering from severe urban transport problems arising from accidents, congestion, air pollution, rising carbon intensity, and chronic under-funding of infrastructure and services. The problems make those cities the most polluted and often the least liveable. Strategic transport modelling has been recognised as an effective approach for developing and testing policy options, especially where it is integrated with land use planning and urban design. However, in most developing-country cities strategic transport modelling has been out of reach for practical policy use because of its sophisticated data and skill requirements, which currently imply unaffordable high costs and long durations for model development. This means that strategic urban transport modelling is the least available where it is needed most urgently. Meanwhile, the spread of smart data in mapping and urban activity monitoring has often been just as rapid in developing countries as in the developed. This has triggered new approaches in micro-level analyses of transport networks, personal movements and vehicles. In the most advanced cases, the new analyses have started to influence strategic modelling. The main hypothesis of this dissertation is that an incorporation of the micro-level smart data and analyses in strategic urban transport modelling will make it feasible to establish a sufficiently robust strategic transport model for evidence-based policy analysis with cost, time and skill thresholds that are close to being affordable in developing country cities. In order to test this main hypothesis, a number of novel model development tasks have been carried out which contribute to the field of applied urban modelling. This new approach aims to contribute to the transformation of the prevailing modus operandi where model development could not start in earnest until extensive data collection and skills training have been completed to a situation where a sufficiently robust model can be established cheaply and quickly to support on-going and incremental refinements. More specifically, new modelling tools have been developed as part of this dissertation using sparse GPS taxi traces to identify slow-moving and stopping traffic hotspots using an extended density-based spatial clustering algorithm that is tolerant of significant data noise, and to estimate congested road speeds (which used to be very costly and time-consuming to obtain if at all). The micro-level network, congested speeds and insights into the nature of the congested traffic have been incorporated into a MEPLAN-based strategic transport model interacting with a MEPLAN-based land use and travel demand model. This means that the strategic economic, social and environmental impacts of transport interventions can be tested in a robust way through accounting for the interactions among transport, land-use and background social-technical trends. A new approach to establish the medium to long term visions for alternative travel demand management and transport investment scenarios has been tested using this model. The methods and algorithms have been tested in a case study of the Greater Beijing region, which consists of the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin together with the surrounding areas in the province of Hebei. The government’s data regulations of restricting overseas studies to using only publicly available data sources have made the case study ideal for testing the new approach. The potential of the new strategic urban transport model has been tested through a wide range of policy scenarios. The results suggest that the new approach developed in this dissertation has made it not only cheaper and faster to develop a robust model, but could also potentially fill a gap in the lack of medium to long term perspectives regarding major road and metro investments over the next two decades. Such analyses could be of critical importance in improving the performance of the transport system in terms of safety, economic efficiency, air quality and carbon reduction given the long lead times to plan and deliver transport infrastructure investments

2nd Symposium on Management of Future motorway and urban Traffic Systems (MFTS 2018): Booklet of abstracts: Ispra, 11-12 June 2018

The Symposium focuses on future traffic management systems, covering the subjects of traffic control, estimation, and modelling of motorway and urban networks, with particular emphasis on the presence of advanced vehicle communication and automation technologies. As connectivity and automation are being progressively introduced in our transport and mobility systems, there is indeed a growing need to understand the implications and opportunities for an enhanced traffic management as well as to identify innovative ways and tools to optimise traffic efficiency. In particular the debate on centralised versus decentralised traffic management in the presence of connected and automated vehicles has started attracting the attention of the research community. In this context, the Symposium provides a remarkable opportunity to share novel ideas and discuss future research directions.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Machine Learning Approaches for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) as a field has emerged quite rapidly in the recent years. A competitive solution coupled with big data gathered for ITS applications needs the latest AI to drive the ITS for the smart and effective public transport planning and management. Although there is a strong need for ITS applications like Advanced Route Planning (ARP) and Traffic Control Systems (TCS) to take the charge and require the minimum of possible human interventions. This thesis develops the models that can predict the traffic link flows on a junction level such as road traffic flows for a freeway or highway road for all traffic conditions. The research first reviews the state-of-the-art time series data prediction techniques with a deep focus in the field of transport Engineering along with the existing statistical and machine leaning methods and their applications for the freeway traffic flow prediction. This review setup a firm work focussed on the view point to look for the superiority in term of prediction performance of individual statistical or machine learning models over another. A detailed theoretical attention has been given, to learn the structure and working of individual chosen prediction models, in relation to the traffic flow data. In modelling the traffic flows from the real-world Highway England (HE) gathered dataset, a traffic flow objective function for highway road prediction models is proposed in a 3-stage framework including the topological breakdown of traffic network into virtual patches, further into nodes and to the basic links flow profiles behaviour estimations. The proposed objective function is tested with ten different prediction models including the statistical, shallow and deep learning constructed hybrid models for bi-directional links flow prediction methods. The effectiveness of the proposed objective function greatly enhances the accuracy of traffic flow prediction, regardless of the machine learning model used. The proposed prediction objective function base framework gives a new approach to model the traffic network to better understand the unknown traffic flow waves and the resulting congestions caused on a junction level. In addition, the results of applied Machine Learning models indicate that RNN variant LSTMs based models in conjunction with neural networks and Deep CNNs, when applied through the proposed objective function, outperforms other chosen machine learning methods for link flow predictions. The experimentation based practical findings reveal that to arrive at an efficient, robust, offline and accurate prediction model apart from feeding the ML mode with the correct representation of the network data, attention should be paid to the deep learning model structure, data pre-processing (i.e. normalisation) and the error matrices used for data behavioural learning. The proposed framework, in future can be utilised to address one of the main aims of the smart transport systems i.e. to reduce the error rates in network wide congestion predictions and the inflicted general traffic travel time delays in real-time