2,538 research outputs found
Empirical exploration of air traffic and human dynamics in terminal airspaces
Air traffic is widely known as a complex, task-critical techno-social system,
with numerous interactions between airspace, procedures, aircraft and air
traffic controllers. In order to develop and deploy high-level operational
concepts and automation systems scientifically and effectively, it is essential
to conduct an in-depth investigation on the intrinsic traffic-human dynamics
and characteristics, which is not widely seen in the literature. To fill this
gap, we propose a multi-layer network to model and analyze air traffic systems.
A Route-based Airspace Network (RAN) and Flight Trajectory Network (FTN)
encapsulate critical physical and operational characteristics; an Integrated
Flow-Driven Network (IFDN) and Interrelated Conflict-Communication Network
(ICCN) are formulated to represent air traffic flow transmissions and
intervention from air traffic controllers, respectively. Furthermore, a set of
analytical metrics including network variables, complex network attributes,
controllers' cognitive complexity, and chaotic metrics are introduced and
applied in a case study of Guangzhou terminal airspace. Empirical results show
the existence of fundamental diagram and macroscopic fundamental diagram at the
route, sector and terminal levels. Moreover, the dynamics and underlying
mechanisms of "ATCOs-flow" interactions are revealed and interpreted by
adaptive meta-cognition strategies based on network analysis of the ICCN.
Finally, at the system level, chaos is identified in conflict system and human
behavioral system when traffic switch to the semi-stable or congested phase.
This study offers analytical tools for understanding the complex human-flow
interactions at potentially a broad range of air traffic systems, and underpins
future developments and automation of intelligent air traffic management
systems.Comment: 30 pages, 28 figures, currently under revie
Patterns of mobility in a smart city
Transportation data in smart cities is becoming increasingly available. This data allows building meaningful, intelligent solutions for city residents and city management authorities, the so-called Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our research focused on Lisbon mobility data, provided by Lisbon municipality. The main research objective was to address mobility problems, interdependence, and cascading effects solutions for the city of Lisbon. We developed a data-driven approach based on historical data with a strong focus on visualization methods and dashboard creation. Also, we applied a method based on time series to do prediction based on the traffic congestion data provided. A CRISP-DM approach was applied, integrating different data sources, using Python. Hence, understand traffic patterns, and help the city authorities in the decision-making process, namely more preparedness, adaptability, responsiveness to events.Os dados de transporte, no âmbito das cidades inteligentes, estĂŁo cada vez mais disponĂveis. Estes dados permitem a construção de soluções inteligentes com impacto significativo na vida dos residentes e nos mecanismos das autoridades de gestĂŁo da cidade, os chamados Sistemas de Transporte Inteligentes. A nossa investigação incidiu sobre os dados de mobilidade urbana da cidade de Lisboa, disponibilizados pelo municĂpio. O principal objetivo da pesquisa foi abordar os problemas de mobilidade, interdependĂŞncia e soluções de efeitos em cascata para a cidade de Lisboa. Para alcançar este objetivo foi desenvolvida uma metodologia baseada nos dados histĂłricos do transito no centro urbano da cidade e principais acessos, com uma forte componente de visualização. Foi tambĂ©m aplicado um mĂ©todo baseado em series temporais para fazer a previsĂŁo das ocorrĂŞncias de transito na cidade de Lisboa. Foi aplicada uma abordagem CRISP-DM, integrando diferentes fontes de dados, utilizando Python.
Esta tese tem como objetivo identificar padrões de mobilidade urbana com análise e visualização de dados, de forma a auxiliar as autoridades municipais no processo de tomada de decisão, nomeadamente estar mais preparada, adaptada e responsiva
Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data
Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds
urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent
behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is
to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which
enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically,
our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is
associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and
aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity.
Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density
areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This
characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days,
providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we
cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban
activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City
during 2015
Entropic Wasserstein Gradient Flows
This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows
for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved
useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations
that model for instance porous media or crowd evolutions. These gradient flows
define a suitable notion of weak solutions for these evolutions and they can be
approximated in a stable way using discrete flows. These discrete flows are
implicit Euler time stepping according to the Wasserstein metric. A bottleneck
of these approaches is the high computational load induced by the resolution of
each step. Indeed, this corresponds to the resolution of a convex optimization
problem involving a Wasserstein distance to the previous iterate. Following
several recent works on the approximation of Wasserstein distances, we consider
a discrete flow induced by an entropic regularization of the transportation
coupling. This entropic regularization allows one to trade the initial
Wasserstein fidelity term for a Kulback-Leibler divergence, which is easier to
deal with numerically. We show how KL proximal schemes, and in particular
Dykstra's algorithm, can be used to compute each step of the regularized flow.
The resulting algorithm is both fast, parallelizable and versatile, because it
only requires multiplications by a Gibbs kernel. On Euclidean domains
discretized on an uniform grid, this corresponds to a linear filtering (for
instance a Gaussian filtering when is the squared Euclidean distance) which
can be computed in nearly linear time. On more general domains, such as
(possibly non-convex) shapes or on manifolds discretized by a triangular mesh,
following a recently proposed numerical scheme for optimal transport, this
Gibbs kernel multiplication is approximated by a short-time heat diffusion
Characterizing corridor-level travel time distributions based on stochastic flows and segment capacities
abstract: Trip travel time reliability is an important measure of transportation system performance and a key factor affecting travelers’ choices. This paper explores a method for estimating travel time distributions for corridors that contain multiple bottlenecks. A set of analytical equations are used to calculate the number of queued vehicles ahead of a probe vehicle and further capture many important factors affecting travel times: the prevailing congestion level, queue discharge rates at the bottlenecks, and flow rates associated with merges and diverges. Based on multiple random scenarios and a vector of arrival times, the lane-by-lane delay at each bottleneck along the corridor is recursively estimated to produce a route-level travel time distribution. The model incorporates stochastic variations of bottleneck capacity and demand and explains the travel time correlations between sequential links. Its data needs are the entering and exiting flow rates and a sense of the lane-by-lane distribution of traffic at each bottleneck. A detailed vehicle trajectory data-set from the Next Generation SIMulation (NGSIM) project has been used to verify that the estimated distributions are valid, and the sources of estimation error are examined.The final version of this article, as published in Cogent Engineering, can be viewed online at: https://www.cogentoa.com/article/10.1080/23311916.2014.99067
Probabilistic Modelling for Unsupervised Analysis of Human Behaviour in Smart Cities
The growth of urban areas in recent years has motivated a large amount of new sensor applications in smart cities. At the centre of many new applications stands the goal of gaining insights into human activity. Scalable monitoring of urban environments can facilitate better informed city planning, efficient security, regular transport and commerce. A large part of monitoring capabilities have already been deployed; however, most rely on expensive motion imagery and privacy invading video cameras. It is possible to use a low-cost sensor alternative, which enables deep understanding of population behaviour such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) data. However, the automated analysis of such low dimensional sensor data, requires new flexible and structured techniques that can describe the generative distribution and time dynamics of the observation data, while accounting for external contextual influences such as time of day or the difference between weekend/weekday trends. In this paper, we propose a novel time series analysis technique that allows for multiple different transition matrices depending on the data’s contextual realisations all following shared adaptive observational models that govern the global distribution of the data given a latent sequence. The proposed approach, which we name Adaptive Input Hidden Markov model (AI-HMM) is tested on two datasets from different sensor types: GPS trajectories of taxis and derived vehicle counts in populated areas. We demonstrate that our model can group different categories of behavioural trends and identify time specific anomalies
Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of Fourier Trajectory Analysis for System Discrimination
With few exceptions, simulation output analysis has focused on static characterizations, to determine a property of the steady-state distribution of a performance metric such as a mean, a quantile, or the distribution itself. Analyses often seek to overcome difficulties induced by autocorrelation of the output stream. But sample paths generated by stochastic simulation exhibit dynamic behavior that is characteristic of system structure and associated distributions. In this technical report, we investigate these dynamic characteristics, as captured by the Fourier transform of a dynamic simulation trajectory. We find that Fourier coefficient magnitudes can have greater discriminatory power than the usual test statistics, and with simpler analysis resulting from the statistical independence of coefficient estimates at different frequencies. Theoretical and Empirical results are provided
CT-Mapper: Mapping Sparse Multimodal Cellular Trajectories using a Multilayer Transportation Network
Mobile phone data have recently become an attractive source of information
about mobility behavior. Since cell phone data can be captured in a passive way
for a large user population, they can be harnessed to collect well-sampled
mobility information. In this paper, we propose CT-Mapper, an unsupervised
algorithm that enables the mapping of mobile phone traces over a multimodal
transport network. One of the main strengths of CT-Mapper is its capability to
map noisy sparse cellular multimodal trajectories over a multilayer
transportation network where the layers have different physical properties and
not only to map trajectories associated with a single layer. Such a network is
modeled by a large multilayer graph in which the nodes correspond to
metro/train stations or road intersections and edges correspond to connections
between them. The mapping problem is modeled by an unsupervised HMM where the
observations correspond to sparse user mobile trajectories and the hidden
states to the multilayer graph nodes. The HMM is unsupervised as the transition
and emission probabilities are inferred using respectively the physical
transportation properties and the information on the spatial coverage of
antenna base stations. To evaluate CT-Mapper we collected cellular traces with
their corresponding GPS trajectories for a group of volunteer users in Paris
and vicinity (France). We show that CT-Mapper is able to accurately retrieve
the real cell phone user paths despite the sparsity of the observed trace
trajectories. Furthermore our transition probability model is up to 20% more
accurate than other naive models.Comment: Under revision in Computer Communication Journa
Evaluation of traffic speed control devices and its applications
Traffic speed control devices have an important role in transportation systems. Static devices, such as speed limit signs, can advocate safe and efficient traffic movements by displaying appropriate speed limits. Changeable message signs have many applications in adjusting the dynamic nature of a transportation system. These applications include but are not limited to variable speed limits based on ambient traffic conditions, work zone management, and warnings about severe weather conditions.
This dissertation evaluated the performance of multiple traffic speed control devices, including static speed limit signs and dynamic changeable message signs. By identifying existing problems, such as data smoothing, traffic characteristics clustering, and event classification, the author proposed some practical engineering solutions for better performance. One of the highlighted applications is a text alert system that actively monitors 50 Iowa work zones, which are equipped with more than 350 roadway sensors, and sends multimedia alert texts to district traffic engineers. The application of a variable advisory speed limit system that reports severe winter weather conditions was also implemented/validated and currently runs in “ghost” mode (without displaying any visible messages to the public) until it is approved.
After conducting a series of analyses in the transportation macroscopic world (data collected by roadway traffic sensors), the current dissertation research expanded into the microscopic driver speed behavior analysis (data collected by instrumented vehicle sensors). A naturalistic driving study focusing on older drivers collected a large amount of detailed individual driving data from multiple sources with high resolutions, including timestamped speed, acceleration, deceleration, and geo locations. This abundant dataset enabled the author to examine an individual’s driving behavior with respect to different speed limits and other factors
Quadratic Mean Field Games
Mean field games were introduced independently by J-M. Lasry and P-L. Lions,
and by M. Huang, R.P. Malham\'e and P. E. Caines, in order to bring a new
approach to optimization problems with a large number of interacting agents.
The description of such models split in two parts, one describing the evolution
of the density of players in some parameter space, the other the value of a
cost functional each player tries to minimize for himself, anticipating on the
rational behavior of the others.
Quadratic Mean Field Games form a particular class among these systems, in
which the dynamics of each player is governed by a controlled Langevin equation
with an associated cost functional quadratic in the control parameter. In such
cases, there exists a deep relationship with the non-linear Schr\"odinger
equation in imaginary time, connexion which lead to effective approximation
schemes as well as a better understanding of the behavior of Mean Field Games.
The aim of this paper is to serve as an introduction to Quadratic Mean Field
Games and their connexion with the non-linear Schr\"odinger equation, providing
to physicists a good entry point into this new and exciting field.Comment: 62 pages, 4 figure
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