INFERRING ROUTING PREFERENCES OF BICYCLISTS FROM SPARSE SETS OF TRAJECTORIES

Understanding the criteria that bicyclists apply when they choose their routes is crucial for planning new bicycle paths or recommending routes to bicyclists. This is becoming more and more important as city councils are becoming increasingly aware of limitations of the transport infrastructure and problems related to automobile traffic. Since different groups of cyclists have different preferences, however, searching for a single set of criteria is prone to failure. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new approach to classify trajectories recorded and shared by bicyclists into different groups and, for each group, to identify favored and unfavored road types. Based on these results we show how to assign weights to the edges of a graph representing the road network such that minimumweight paths in the graph, which can be computed with standard shortest-path algorithms, correspond to adequate routes. Our method combines known algorithms for machine learning and the analysis of trajectories in an innovative way and, thereby, constitutes a new comprehensive solution for the problem of deriving routing preferences from initially unclassified trajectories. An important property of our method is that it yields reasonable results even if the given set of trajectories is sparse in the sense that it does not cover all segments of the cycle network

Utilising urban context recognition and machine learning to improve the generalisation of buildings

The introduction of automated generalisation procedures in map production systems requires that generalisation systems are capable of processing large amounts of map data in acceptable time and that cartographic quality is similar to traditional map products. With respect to these requirements, we examine two complementary approaches that should improve generalisation systems currently in use by national topographic mapping agencies. Our focus is particularly on self-evaluating systems, taking as an example those systems that build on the multi-agent paradigm. The first approach aims to improve the cartographic quality by utilising cartographic expert knowledge relating to spatial context. More specifically, we introduce expert rules for the selection of generalisation operations based on a classification of buildings into five urban structure types, including inner city, urban, suburban, rural, and industrial and commercial areas. The second approach aims to utilise machine learning techniques to extract heuristics that allow us to reduce the search space and hence the time in which a good cartographical solution is reached. Both approaches are tested individually and in combination for the generalisation of buildings from map scale 1:5000 to the target map scale of 1:25 000. Our experiments show improvements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. We provide evidence that both approaches complement each other and that a combination of expert and machine learnt rules give better results than the individual approaches. Both approaches are sufficiently general to be applicable to other forms of self-evaluating, constraint-based systems than multi-agent systems, and to other feature classes than buildings. Problems have been identified resulting from difficulties to formalise cartographic quality by means of constraints for the control of the generalisation process