Spatial data science for sustainable mobility

The constant rise of urban mobility and transport has led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions. In order to ensure livable environments for future generations and counteract climate change, it will be necessary to reduce our future CO2 footprint. Spatial data science contributes to this effort in major ways, also fuelled by recent progress regarding the availability of spatial big data, computational methods and geospatial technologies. This paper demonstrates important contributions from Spatial data science to mobility pattern analysis and prediction, context integration, and the employment of geospatial technologies for changing people\u27s mobility behavior. Among the interdisciplinary research challenges that lie ahead of us are an enhanced public availability of mobility studies and their data sets, improved privacy protection strategies, spatially-aware machine learning methods, and evaluating the potential for people\u27s long-term behavior change towards sustainable mobility

Many to many mobile maps

The rapid development of mobile computing devices along with a variety of Web 2.0 social networking tools has led to a dramatic change in the way maps and other spatial displays are utilized. The evolution from stand-alone desktop GIS to the interactive, mobile devices, in which information from one or more sources and is sent to one or more sinks, is discussed. The result is access to real-time information, which is generated from both traditional sources, social networks, and other specialized geowikis. Both the benefits of many to many mobile maps and the emergence of new problems, such as understanding the needs of the user and providing appropriate context, are discussed

The semantics of similarity in geographic information retrieval

Similarity measures have a long tradition in fields such as information retrieval artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Within the last years these measures have been extended and reused to measure semantic similarity; i.e. for comparing meanings rather than syntactic differences. Various measures for spatial applications have been developed but a solid foundation for answering what they measure; how they are best applied in information retrieval; which role contextual information plays; and how similarity values or rankings should be interpreted is still missing. It is therefore difficult to decide which measure should be used for a particular application or to compare results from different similarity theories. Based on a review of existing similarity measures we introduce a framework to specify the semantics of similarity. We discuss similarity-based information retrieval paradigms as well as their implementation in web-based user interfaces for geographic information retrieval to demonstrate the applicability of the framework. Finally we formulate open challenges for similarity research

How do you go where? Improving next location prediction by learning travel mode information using transformers

Predicting the next visited location of an individual is a key problem in human mobility analysis, as it is required for the personalization and optimization of sustainable transport options. Here, we propose a transformer decoder-based neural network to predict the next location an individual will visit based on historical locations, time, and travel modes, which are behaviour dimensions often overlooked in previous work. In particular, the prediction of the next travel mode is designed as an auxiliary task to help guide the network's learning. For evaluation, we apply this approach to two large-scale and long-term GPS tracking datasets involving more than 600 individuals. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art next location prediction methods by a large margin (8.05% and 5.60% relative increase in F1-score for the two datasets, respectively). We conduct an extensive ablation study that quantifies the influence of considering temporal features, travel mode information, and the auxiliary task on the prediction results. Moreover, we experimentally determine the performance upper bound when including the next mode prediction in our model. Finally, our analysis indicates that the performance of location prediction varies significantly with the chosen next travel mode by the individual. These results show potential for a more systematic consideration of additional dimensions of travel behaviour in human mobility prediction tasks. The source code of our model and experiments is available at https://github.com/mie-lab/location-mode-prediction.Comment: updated main figure, 10 pages, camera ready SIGSPATIAL '2

Evaluating geospatial context information for travel mode detection

Detecting travel modes from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) trajectories is essential for understanding individual travel behavior and a prerequisite for achieving sustainable transport systems. While studies have acknowledged the benefits of incorporating geospatial context information into travel mode detection models, few have summarized context modeling approaches and analyzed the significance of these context features, hindering the development of an efficient model. Here, we identify context representations from related work and propose an analytical pipeline to assess the contribution of geospatial context information for travel mode detection based on a random forest model and the SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) method. Through experiments on a large-scale GNSS tracking dataset, we report that features describing relationships with infrastructure networks, such as the distance to the railway or road network, significantly contribute to the model's prediction. Moreover, features related to the geospatial point entities help identify public transport travel, but most land-use and land-cover features barely contribute to the task. We finally reveal that geospatial contexts have distinct contributions in identifying different travel modes, providing insights into selecting appropriate context information and modeling approaches. The results from this study enhance our understanding of the relationship between movement and geospatial context and guide the implementation of effective and efficient transport mode detection models.Comment: updated Method and Discussion; accepted by Journal of Transport Geograph

Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Schedules Based on Probabilistic Forecast of Individual Mobility

The number of electric vehicles (EVs) has been rapidly increasing over the last decade, motivated by the effort to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and the fast development of battery technology. This trend challenges distribution grids since EVs will bring significant stress if the charging of many EVs is not coordinated. Among the many strategies to cope with this challenge, next-day EV energy demand forecasting plays a key role. Existing studies have focused on predicting the next-day energy demand of EVs on the aggregated and individual levels. However, these studies have not yet extensively considered individual user mobility behaviors, which exhibit a high level of predictability. In this study, we consider several mobility features of individual users when forecasting the next-day energy demand of individual EVs. Three types of quantile regression models are used to generate probabilistic forecasts of energy demand, particularly the next-day energy consumption and parking duration. Based on the prediction results, two time-shifting smart charging strategies are designed: unidirectional and bidirectional smart charging. These two strategies are compared with an uncontrolled charging baseline to evaluate their financial benefits and peak-shaving effects. Our results show that human mobility features can partially improve the prediction of next-day individual EV energy demand. Additionally, users and distribution grids can benefit from smart charging strategies both financially and technically.</p

Synthesizing population, health, and place

This report on the Vespucci Institute on health geography in 2013 emphasizes the importance of research that connects population, health, and place from a holistic perspective. We review important trends related to Health GIS and highlight directions for future research in this area that were identified at the Institute

Enhanced Multi Criteria Decision Analysis for Planning Power Transmission Lines

The energy transition towards alternative energy sources requires new power transmission lines to connect these additional energy production plants with electricity distribution centers. For this reason, Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) offers a useful approach to determine the optimal path of future transmission lines with minimum impact on the environment, on the landscape, and on affected citizens. As objections could deteriorate such a project and in turn increase costs, transparent communication regarding the planning procedure is required that fosters citizens\u27 acceptance. In this context, GIS-based information on the criteria taken into account and for modeling possible power transmission lines is essential. However, planners often forget that the underlying multi criteria decision model and the used data might lead to biased results. Therefore, this study empirically investigates the effect of various MCDA parameters by applying a sensitivity analysis on a multi criteria decision model. The output of this analysis is evaluated combining a Cluster Analysis, a Principal Component Analysis, and a Multivariate Analysis of Variance. Our results indicate that the variability of different corridor alternatives can be increased by using different MCDA parameter combinations. In particular, we found that applying continuous boundary models on areas leads to more distinct corridor alternatives than using a sharp-edged model, and better reflects actual planning practice for protecting areas against transmission lines. Comparing the results of two study areas, we conclude that our decision model behaved similarly across both sites and, hence, that the proposed procedure for enhancing the decision model is applicable to other study areas with comparable topographies. These results can help decision-makers and transmission line planners in simplifying and improving their decision models in order to increase credibility, legitimacy, and thus practical applicability