Incorporating Systems Engineering Methodologies to Increase the Transferability of Journey Planners

AbstractOne characteristic that is highly desired in transportation-related applications, and particularly journey planners, is transferability – i.e., the capacity to be used with minimal modification in different locations. To achieve transferability, the initial design must take into account all factors that may diverge between locations, including existing modes of transport, the availability of required data, the technological habits of users, etc. In consequence, a highly transferable system is difficult and expensive to develop and maintain. A very flexible initial design, one ensuring low-cost adaptability of the system for different cities, regions, or countries, might not be cost-effective. On the other hand, a rigid design, tailored for a specific location, might act as a barrier to implementing the system elsewhere. This dilemma has motivated researchers to seek a structured process for selecting the most promising design, one that will realize the benefits of transferability while minimizing development costs.One of the fundamental building blocks of structured design in SE is requirements-design exploration. This paper evaluates the use of Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE), a leading design exploration process, for the effective design of journey planners.We examine the process of changeability assessment (e.g., transferability) in light of the goals of journey planning from the point of view of different stakeholders: travelers, private developers, and transport authorities. The analysis demonstrates how tradespace exploration can also be used to identify specific designs that bridge the gap between the public and private sectors and provide value over time to all parties. Moreover, when specific concerns of public authorities are not met, tradespace exploration can reveal measures the public sector can take (financial or others) for making their preferred design attractive to the private sector as well

Car-Sharing Subscription Preferences and the Role of Incentives: The Case of Copenhagen, Munich, and Tel Aviv-Yafo

Car-sharing services provide short-term car access, contributing to sustainable urban mobility and generating positive societal and environmental impacts. Attraction and retention of members are essential for the profitability and survival of these services in cities. Yet, the relevance of a variety of possible business models’ features for car-sharing subscriptions is still under-explored. This study examines individuals’ preferences for subscribing to different car-sharing business models, focusing on the attractiveness of car-sharing-related features and incentives in different contexts. We designed a stated preference experiment and collected data from three different urban car-sharing settings: Copenhagen, Munich, and Tel Aviv-Yafo. A mixed logit model was estimated to uncover the determinants of each city’s car-sharing plan subscription. The achieved insights pave the road for the actual design of car-sharing business models and attractive incentives by car-sharing companies in the studied or similar cities. Our findings reveal that although some car-sharing intrinsic features are likely to be relevant everywhere (e.g., pricing, parking conditions), the local context affects the preferences of others. In Munich, respondents prefer car-sharing services with fleets composed of electric vehicles and value high accessibility to shared cars, so marketing campaigns focusing on the positive environmental impacts of car-sharing and strategic distribution of shared cars (e.g., hubs) are expected to be very appealing there. As for Copenhagen, a high probability of finding a car, the opportunity to book a shared car in advance, and having plans including other modes are more appreciated, making hubs in high-demand areas and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) plans very attractive. Finally, in Tel Aviv, our findings highlight the advantages of exploring different pricing schemes and offering dynamic incentives to users for fleet rebalancing to positively contribute to car-sharing subscriptions and ridership

Identifying attributes of public transport services for urban tourists: A data-mining method

The current work focuses on Quality of Service (QoS) of Public Transport (PT) attributes in urban tourist destinations. In particular, we aim to reveal which attributes are most significant for tourists prior to their arrival at their destination, as reflected in questions posted in TripAdvisor Question and Answer forums, a widely used social media platform. We used a data-mining method to classify questions into categories relevant to QoS, using a sample of 8905 items posted between 2005 and 2018 in TripAdvisor forums for seven urban destinations in the United States and Western Europe. We found four PT-QoS attributes: Pricing and ticketing, Accessibility, Trip duration, and Service availability (hours of operation and frequency). These attributes have similar relative significance for all destinations, origins, seasons, and years we checked. Hence, they can help service operators and policymakers to understand tourists\u27 preferences and to adjust PT services accordingly

A decision-support methodology for priority allocation among road users at signalized junctions

AbstractChanging traffic signal programs due to traffic dynamics is an essential step to improve the quality of the city's traffic management. But the large number of players, who are competing for the same resources, complicates the selection of new signal programs. The cars, Public Transport (PT) and pedestrians all coming from different directions create a complex right of way allocation problem. The selection of a new program becomes an especially complex task when PT priority logic is integrated into the signal program planning. This paper suggests a methodology for performing the selection process. The methodology described in this article for selecting an alternative signal program is based on a definition of Standard Planning Attributes (SPA), which serve as a “data dictionary”. The selection criteria, called Integrated Components, takes into account the interdependencies linking the various Signal Groups (SGs) and Standard Planning Attributes and the directivity of the relationship between Planning Attributes (PA) and the performance level of each road user

Enhancing Transport Data Collection through Social Media Sources: Methods, Challenges and Opportunities for Textual Data

Social media data now enriches and supplements information flow in various sectors of society. The question addressed here is whether social media can act as a credible information source of sufficient quality to meet the needs of transport planners, operators, policy makers and the travelling public. A typology of primary transport data needs, current and new data sources is initially established, following which the paper focuses on social media textual data in particular. Three sub-questions are investigated; the potential to use social media data alongside existing transport data, the technical challenges in extracting transport relevant information from social media and the wider barriers to the uptake of this data. Following an overview of the text mining process to extract relevant information from the corpus, a review of the challenges this approach holds for the transport sector is given. These include ontologies, sentiment analysis, location names and measuring accuracy. Finally, institutional issues in the greater use of social media are highlighted, concluding that social media information have not yet been fully explored. The contribution of the work is in scoping the technical challenges in mining social media data within the transport context, laying the foundation for further research in this fiel

A Framework Coupling VISSIM and OMNeT++ to Simulate Future Intelligent Transportation Systems

With the spread of connected vehicles (CVs), a growth of novel information services exploiting data transmitted by CVs is expected. Wireless communication systems, in particular in vehicular applications, operate with a varying level of transmission reliability, which may affect the quality of V2X-data-driven intelligent transport systems (ITS). Therefore, the performance of ITS should be evaluated in a variety of conditions and the configuration of parameters should be fine-tuned in a safe testbed, using computer simulations. A simple framework is presented, which couples VISSIM traffic simulation and OMNeT++ communication networks simulation in real time, enabling an assessment of the relationship between a communication reliability and transport service quality. A functionality of the framework is demonstrated by applying it to a scheme controlling signalized intersections while estimating traffic flows from the V2I data