Estimating Uncertainty of Bus Arrival Times and Passenger Occupancies

Travel time reliability and the availability of seating and boarding space are important indicators of bus service quality and strongly influence users’ satisfaction and attitudes towards bus transit systems. With Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) and Automated Passenger Counter (APC) units becoming common on buses, some agencies have begun to provide real-time bus location and passenger occupancy information as a means to improve perceived transit reliability. Travel time prediction models have also been established based on AVL and APC data. However, existing travel time prediction models fail to provide an indication of the uncertainty associated with these estimates. This can cause a false sense of precision, which can lead to experiences associated with unreliable service. Furthermore, no existing models are available to predict individual bus occupancies at downstream stops to help travelers understand if there will be space available to board. The purpose of this project was to develop modeling frameworks to predict travel times (and associated uncertainties) as well as individual bus passenger occupancies. For travel times, accelerated failure-time survival models were used to predict the entire distribution of travel times expected. The survival models were found to be just as accurate as models developed using traditional linear regression techniques. However, the survival models were found to have smaller variances associated with predictions. For passenger occupancies, linear and count regression models were compared. The linear regression models were found to outperform count regression models, perhaps due to the additive nature of the passenger boarding process. Various modeling frameworks were tested and the best frameworks were identified for predictions at near stops (within five stops downstream) and far stops (further than eight stops). Overall, these results can be integrated into existing real-time transit information systems to improve the quality of information provided to passengers

Data Fusion for MaaS: Opportunities and Challenges

© 2018 IEEE. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in design is an essential facilitator for the development and implementation of smart cities, where modern cooperative transportation and integrated mobility are highly demanded. Owing to greater availability of different data sources, data fusion problem in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has been very challenging, where machine learning modelling and approaches are promising to offer an important yet comprehensive solution. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent advances in data fusion for Mobility as a Service (MaaS), including the basics of data fusion theory and the related machine learning methods. We also highlight the opportunities and challenges on MaaS, and discuss potential future directions of research on the integrated mobility modelling

Benchmarking Travel Time and Demand Prediction Methods Using Large-scale Metro Smart Card Data

Urban mass transit systems generate large volumes of data via automated systems established for ticketing, signalling, and other operational processes. This study is motivated by the observation that despite the availability of sophisticated quantitative methods, most public transport operators are constrained in exploiting the information their datasets contain. This paper intends to address this gap in the context of real-time demand and travel time prediction with smart card data. We comparatively benchmark the predictive performance of four quantitative prediction methods: multivariate linear regression (MVLR) and semiparametric regression (SPR) widely used in the econometric literature, and random forest regression (RFR) and support vector machine regression (SVMR) from machine learning. We find that the SVMR and RFR methods are the most accurate in travel flow and travel time prediction, respectively. However, we also find that the SPR technique offers lower computation time at the expense of minor inefficiency in predictive power in comparison with the two machine learning methods