921 research outputs found
Learning Mobility Flows from Urban Features with Spatial Interaction Models and Neural Networks
A fundamental problem of interest to policy makers, urban planners, and other
stakeholders involved in urban development projects is assessing the impact of
planning and construction activities on mobility flows. This is a challenging
task due to the different spatial, temporal, social, and economic factors
influencing urban mobility flows. These flows, along with the influencing
factors, can be modelled as attributed graphs with both node and edge features
characterising locations in a city and the various types of relationships
between them. In this paper, we address the problem of assessing
origin-destination (OD) car flows between a location of interest and every
other location in a city, given their features and the structural
characteristics of the graph. We propose three neural network architectures,
including graph neural networks (GNN), and conduct a systematic comparison
between the proposed methods and state-of-the-art spatial interaction models,
their modifications, and machine learning approaches. The objective of the
paper is to address the practical problem of estimating potential flow between
an urban development project location and other locations in the city, where
the features of the project location are known in advance. We evaluate the
performance of the models on a regression task using a custom data set of
attributed car OD flows in London. We also visualise the model performance by
showing the spatial distribution of flow residuals across London.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of 2020 IEEE
International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP 2020
Improving Sustainable Mobility through Modal Rewarding: The GOOD_GO Smart Platform
Private car mobility registers today a h igh accident rate and around 70% of the overall CO2
emissions from transport were generated by road mode split (European Commission, 2016). Moreover, in urban
areas they occur 38% of the overall fatalities from road transport, and 23% of the overall CO2 emissions
(European Commission, 2013). As a result, a modal shift of at least a part of passenger transport in urban areas,
from private car to sustainable transport systems is desirable.
This research aims to promote sustainable mobility through two mutually reinforcing "main actions": firstly,
there is a r ewarding Open-Source platform, named as GOOD_GO; secondly, there is the SW/HW system
connecting to the wide world of private and/or shared bicycles. Through the GOOD_GO platform Web portal
and App, a user enters a so called 'social rewarding game' thought to incentive sustainable mobility habits, and
gets access to the second item consisting of a system to disincentive bike-theft and based on the passive RFID
technology.
The low-cost deterrent bike-theft and bike monitoring/tracking system is functional to bring a big number of
citizens inside the rewarding game.
In 2018, a pilot test has implemented in the city of Livorno (Tuscany, It), and it involved around 1,000 citizens.
Results were quite encouraging and today, the cities of Livorno, Pisa and Bolzano will enlarge the incentive
system both to home-to-school and home-to-work mobility. The Good_Go platform is an actual M-a-a-S
(Mobility-as-a-Service) application, and it becoming a Mobility Management decision system support, jointly
with the opportunity of organizing more incentive tenders and rewarding systems types
Validity of Machine Learning in Assessing Large Texts Through Sustainability Indicators
As machine learning becomes more widely used in policy and environmental impact settings, concerns about accuracy and fairness arise. These concerns have piqued the interest
of researchers, who have advanced new approaches and theoretical insights to enhance
data gathering, treatment and models’ training. Nonetheless, few works have looked at the
trade-offs between appropriateness and accuracy in indicator evaluation to comprehend
how these constraints and approaches may better redound into policymaking and have a
more significant impact across culture and sustainability matters for urban governance.
This empirical study fulfils this void by researching indicators’ accuracy and utilizing
algorithmic models to test the benefits of large text-based analysis. Here we describe applied work in which we find affinity and occurrence in indicators trade-offs that result be
significant in practice to evaluate large texts. In the study, objectivity and fairness are kept
substantially without sacrificing accuracy, explicitly focusing on improving the processing
of indicators to be truthfully assessed. This observation is robust when cross-referring indicators and unique words. The empirical results advance a novel form of large text analysis through machine intelligence and refute a widely held belief that artificial intelligence
text processing necessitates either accepting a significant reduction in accuracy or fairness.Funding for open access charge: CRUE-Universitat Jaume
An investigation into machine learning approaches for forecasting spatio-temporal demand in ride-hailing service
In this paper, we present machine learning approaches for characterizing and
forecasting the short-term demand for on-demand ride-hailing services. We
propose the spatio-temporal estimation of the demand that is a function of
variable effects related to traffic, pricing and weather conditions. With
respect to the methodology, a single decision tree, bootstrap-aggregated
(bagged) decision trees, random forest, boosted decision trees, and artificial
neural network for regression have been adapted and systematically compared
using various statistics, e.g. R-square, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and
slope. To better assess the quality of the models, they have been tested on a
real case study using the data of DiDi Chuxing, the main on-demand ride hailing
service provider in China. In the current study, 199,584 time-slots describing
the spatio-temporal ride-hailing demand has been extracted with an
aggregated-time interval of 10 mins. All the methods are trained and validated
on the basis of two independent samples from this dataset. The results revealed
that boosted decision trees provide the best prediction accuracy (RMSE=16.41),
while avoiding the risk of over-fitting, followed by artificial neural network
(20.09), random forest (23.50), bagged decision trees (24.29) and single
decision tree (33.55).Comment: Currently under review for journal publicatio
A Causal Discovery Approach To Learn How Urban Form Shapes Sustainable Mobility Across Continents
Global sustainability requires low-carbon urban transport systems, shaped by
adequate infrastructure, deployment of low-carbon transport modes and shifts in
travel behavior. To adequately implement alterations in infrastructure, it's
essential to grasp the location-specific cause-and-effect mechanisms that the
constructed environment has on travel. Yet, current research falls short in
representing causal relationships between the 6D urban form variables and
travel, generalizing across different regions, and modeling urban form effects
at high spatial resolution. Here, we address all three gaps by utilizing a
causal discovery and an explainable machine learning framework to detect urban
form effects on intra-city travel based on high-resolution mobility data of six
cities across three continents. We show that both distance to city center,
demographics and density indirectly affect other urban form features. By
considering the causal relationships, we find that location-specific influences
align across cities, yet vary in magnitude. In addition, the spread of the city
and the coverage of jobs across the city are the strongest determinants of
travel-related emissions, highlighting the benefits of compact development and
associated benefits. Differences in urban form effects across the cities call
for a more holistic definition of 6D measures. Our work is a starting point for
location-specific analysis of urban form effects on mobility behavior using
causal discovery approaches, which is highly relevant for city planners and
municipalities across continents.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, 4 table
Reviews and Perspectives on Smart and Sustainable Metropolitan and Regional Cities
The notion of smart and sustainable cities offers an integrated and holistic approach to urbanism by aiming to achieve the long-term goals of urban sustainability and resilience. In essence, a smart and sustainable city is an urban locality that functions as a robust system of systems with sustainable practices to generate desired outcomes and futures for all humans and non-humans. This book contributes to improving research and practice in smart and sustainable metropolitan as well as regional cities and urbanism by bringing together literature reviews and scholarly perspective pieces, forming an open access knowledge warehouse. It contains contributions that offer insights into research and practice in smart and sustainable metropolitan and regional cities by producing in-depth conceptual debates and perspectives, insights from the literature and best practice, and thoroughly identified research themes and development trends. This book serves as a repository of relevant information, material, and knowledge to support research, policymaking, practice, and the transferability of experiences to address challenges in establishing smart and sustainable metropolitan as well as regional cities and urbanism in the era of climate change, biodiversity collapse, natural disasters, pandemics, and socioeconomic inequalities
Origin-Destination Network Generation via Gravity-Guided GAN
Origin-destination (OD) flow, which contains valuable population mobility
information including direction and volume, is critical in many urban
applications, such as urban planning, transportation management, etc. However,
OD data is not always easy to access due to high costs or privacy concerns.
Therefore, we must consider generating OD through mathematical models. Existing
works utilize physics laws or machine learning (ML) models to build the
association between urban structures and OD flows while these two kinds of
methods suffer from the limitation of over-simplicity and poor generalization
ability, respectively. In this paper, we propose to adopt physics-informed ML
paradigm, which couple the physics scientific knowledge and data-driven ML
methods, to construct a model named Origin-Destination Generation Networks
(ODGN) for better population mobility modeling by leveraging the complementary
strengths of combining physics and ML methods. Specifically, we first build a
Multi-view Graph Attention Networks (MGAT) to capture the urban features of
every region and then use a gravity-guided predictor to obtain OD flow between
every two regions. Furthermore, we use a conditional GAN training strategy and
design a sequence-based discriminator to consider the overall topological
features of OD as a network. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have
been done to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with
baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Understanding public transit patterns with open geodemographics to facilitate public transport planning
Plentiful studies have discussed the potential applications of contactless
smart card from understanding interchange patterns to transit
network analysis and user classifications. However, the incomplete
and anonymous nature of the smart card data inherently limit the
interpretations and understanding of thefindings, whichfurther limit
planning implementations. Geodemographics, as ‘an analysis of people
by where they live’, can be utilised as a promising supplement
to provide contextual information to transport planning. This paper
develops a methodological framework that conjointly integrates personalised
smart card data with open geodemographics so as to pursue
a better understanding of the traveller’s behaviours. It adopts
a text mining technology, latent Dirichlet allocation modelling, to
extract the transit patterns from the personalised smart card data
and then use the open geodemographics derived from census data
to enhance the interpretation of the patterns. Moreover, it presents
night tube as an example to illustrate its potential usefulness in
public transport planning
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