Introduction to the special section:Designing a better user experience for self-service systems

June 2013 issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication features a special section on 'Designing a Better User Experience for Self-Service Systems'. Self-service systems offers the users the benefit of 24/7 access to an ever-growing range of services and perhaps also a strong sense of autonomy and fulfillment. Three papers in this section approach the design of the user experience of self-service systems in an integrated way and show the readership of this journal what methods and techniques can be used in this type of design process. These are, 'Identifying User Experience Factors for Mobile Incident Reporting in Urban Contexts,' by Bach, Bernhaupt, and Winckler, 'Improving User Experience for Passenger Information Systems. Prototypes and Reference Objects,' by Wirtz and Jakobs, and in 'A User-Centered Design Approach to Self-Service Ticket Vending Machines,' by Siebenhandl, Schreder, Smuc, Mayr, and Nagl

Establishing a Central Archive for Transit Passenger Data

This report describes the rationale, background, establishing organization, and future steps of CATPAD, the Central Archive for Transit Passenger Data. The Central Archive for Transit Passenger Data is a repository that collects, indexes, archives, and makes available online the transit survey instruments, data, and reports collected across the country. This resource is unique in its focus on the disaggregated information of individual transit users – information that is critical for a range of transportation planning analyses. In addition, where available, CATPAD contains aggregated information, such as station boardings and service and fare schedules, to provide key context for the disaggregate person-level data. The Central Archive for Transit Passenger Data seeks to overcome the current impediments to accessing transit survey data by providing a single, searchable, internet archive to store and disseminate this valuable information. The Central Archive for Transit Passenger Data explicitly aims to expand the public return on the considerable investment made to gather transit passenger data. The resource is designed from the start to serve the needs of a range of use cases from transportation planners and policy makers to researchers and community advocates. The goal of CATPAD is to make useful data available to inform transit decision making at all levels and to foster ongoing refinement of the nation’s transit network

Privacy-Preserving Vehicle Assignment for Mobility-on-Demand Systems

Urban transportation is being transformed by mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems. One of the goals of MoD systems is to provide personalized transportation services to passengers. This process is facilitated by a centralized operator that coordinates the assignment of vehicles to individual passengers, based on location data. However, current approaches assume that accurate positioning information for passengers and vehicles is readily available. This assumption raises privacy concerns. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a method that protects passengers' drop-off locations (i.e., their travel destinations). Formally, we solve a batch assignment problem that routes vehicles at obfuscated origin locations to passenger locations (since origin locations correspond to previous drop-off locations), such that the mean waiting time is minimized. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, we formalize the notion of privacy for continuous vehicle-to-passenger assignment in MoD systems, and integrate a privacy mechanism that provides formal guarantees. Second, we present a scalable algorithm that takes advantage of superfluous (idle) vehicles in the system, combining multiple iterations of the Hungarian algorithm to allocate a redundant number of vehicles to a single passenger. As a result, we are able to reduce the performance deterioration induced by the privacy mechanism. We evaluate our methods on a real, large-scale data set consisting of over 11 million taxi rides (specifying vehicle availability and passenger requests), recorded over a month's duration, in the area of Manhattan, New York. Our work demonstrates that privacy can be integrated into MoD systems without incurring a significant loss of performance, and moreover, that this loss can be further minimized at the cost of deploying additional (redundant) vehicles into the fleet.Comment: 8 pages; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 201

Disrupting Complex Systems with Emerging Technologies: A Study on United States Airport Operations

The number of United States domestic commercial flight passengers are growing every year, which means the number of people checking-in, dropping off their bags, and going through TSA within airports is equally growing. With the increasing number of passengers and aging airports, there are several areas of pain points within airports where passengers hit a bottleneck due to the current systems that airports have in place. There are three main areas that we are going to reference. First the check-in process, where customers have to get their tickets, input identification information, and check-in for their flight. Second, baggage-drop off, where customers get their baggage weighed and tagged. Lastly, is Transport Security Administration (TSA). This is where consumers get their carry-on bags scanned as well as their person. In each of these areas, there are some levels of inconvenience imposed on the customer by the current system. With technological advancements being used in other industries, the goal of this thesis is to look at what existing technologies can be modified and used within airport operations to reduce the long lines that customers face every time they travel

Demand responsive transport: A review of schemes in England and Wales

Local-authority-administered Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) schemes are increasingly prevalent in England and Wales, partly as a result of the growth in the availability of government funding. However, insufficient research has been undertaken into the nature of these schemes and their performance, making it difficult to predict their future role. In this respect, a survey was undertaken to collect data on the background, operation, and performance of DRT schemes in England and Wales. It found that DRT schemes are often designed in an attempt to tackle social problems caused by poor accessibility and that they took time to become established, to achieve their objectives, and to reach an acceptable performance in terms of subsidy level. The paper concludes that local-authority-led DRT schemes have a role to play, but that lessons learned from schemes currently in operation must be heeded by those contemplating new scheme development

High speed research system study. Advanced flight deck configuration effects

In mid-1991 NASA contracted with industry to study the high-speed civil transport (HSCT) flight deck challenges and assess the benefits, prior to initiating their High Speed Research Program (HSRP) Phase 2 efforts, then scheduled for FY-93. The results of this nine-month effort are presented, and a number of the most significant findings for the specified advanced concepts are highlighted: (1) a no nose-droop configuration; (2) a far forward cockpit location; and (3) advanced crew monitoring and control of complex systems. The results indicate that the no nose-droop configuration is critically dependent upon the design and development of a safe, reliable, and certifiable Synthetic Vision System (SVS). The droop-nose configuration would cause significant weight, performance, and cost penalties. The far forward cockpit location, with the conventional side-by-side seating provides little economic advantage; however, a configuration with a tandem seating arrangement provides a substantial increase in either additional payload (i.e., passengers) or potential downsizing of the vehicle with resulting increases in performance efficiencies and associated reductions in emissions. Without a droop nose, forward external visibility is negated and takeoff/landing guidance and control must rely on the use of the SVS. The technologies enabling such capabilities, which de facto provides for Category 3 all-weather operations on every flight independent of weather, represent a dramatic benefits multiplier in a 2005 global ATM network: both in terms of enhanced economic viability and environmental acceptability

An intelligent framework and prototype for autonomous maintenance planning in the rail industry

This paper details the development of the AUTONOM project, a project that aims to provide an enterprise system tailored to the planning needs of the rail industry. AUTONOM extends research in novel sensing, scheduling, and decision-making strategies customised for the automated planning of maintenance activities within the rail industry. This paper sets out a framework and software prototype and details the current progress of the project. In the continuation of the AUTONOM project it is anticipated that the combination of techniques brought together in this work will be capable of addressing a wider range of problem types, offered by Network rail and organisations in different industries

I Am The Passenger: How Visual Motion Cues Can Influence Sickness For In-Car VR

This paper explores the use of VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) in-car and in-motion for the first time. Immersive HMDs are becoming everyday consumer items and, as they offer new possibilities for entertainment and productivity, people will want to use them during travel in, for example, autonomous cars. However, their use is confounded by motion sickness caused in-part by the restricted visual perception of motion conflicting with physically perceived vehicle motion (accelerations/rotations detected by the vestibular system). Whilst VR HMDs restrict visual perception of motion, they could also render it virtually, potentially alleviating sensory conflict. To study this problem, we conducted the first on-road and in motion study to systematically investigate the effects of various visual presentations of the real-world motion of a car on the sickness and immersion of VR HMD wearing passengers. We established new baselines for VR in-car motion sickness, and found that there is no one best presentation with respect to balancing sickness and immersion. Instead, user preferences suggest different solutions are required for differently susceptible users to provide usable VR in-car. This work provides formative insights for VR designers and an entry point for further research into enabling use of VR HMDs, and the rich experiences they offer, when travelling

Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last

Direct manipulation interfaces and programmatic systems have distinct and complementary strengths. The former provide intuitive, immediate visual feedback and enable rapid prototyping, whereas the latter enable complex, reusable abstractions. Unfortunately, existing systems typically force users into just one of these two interaction modes. We present a system called Sketch-n-Sketch that integrates programmatic and direct manipulation for the particular domain of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). In Sketch-n-Sketch, the user writes a program to generate an output SVG canvas. Then the user may directly manipulate the canvas while the system immediately infers a program update in order to match the changes to the output, a workflow we call live synchronization. To achieve this, we propose (i) a technique called trace-based program synthesis that takes program execution history into account in order to constrain the search space and (ii) heuristics for dealing with ambiguities. Based on our experience with examples spanning 2,000 lines of code and from the results of a preliminary user study, we believe that Sketch-n-Sketch provides a novel workflow that can augment traditional programming systems. Our approach may serve as the basis for live synchronization in other application domains, as well as a starting point for yet more ambitious ways of combining programmatic and direct manipulation.Comment: PLDI 2016 Paper + Supplementary Appendice