Intelligent Transportation Systems

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Transportation

Adam Cohen
2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping the transportation sector, driven by advancements in computing power, data availability, and algorithms. AI can be understood through key concepts like machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks, which enable tasks such as data analysis, decision-making, and language processing. Within transportation, AI applications are diverse, including automated driving, traffic management, predictive maintenance, and cybersecurity. Use cases can also encompass optimizing traffic flow through adaptive signal control, enhancing safety...

Mobile Apps and Transportation: Exploring Data Metric Potential and User Response to Multi-modal Traveler Information (UCCONNECT)

Susan Shaheen
Martin, Elliot
Adam Cohen
Musunuri, Apoorva
Bhattacharyya, Abhinav
2016

In recent years, technological and social forces have pushed smartphone applications (apps) from the fringe to the mainstream. Understanding the role of transportation apps in urban mobility is important for policy development and transportation planners. This study evaluates the role and impact of multimodal aggregators from a variety of perspectives, including a literature review; a review of the most innovative, disruptive, and highest-rated transportation apps; interviews with experts in the industry, and a user survey of former multimodal aggregator RideScout users. Between February...

Activity-Based Human Mobility Patterns Inferred from Mobile Phone Data: A Case Study of Singapore

Jiang, Shan
Ferreira, Joseph
Marta Gonzalez
2017

In this study, with Singapore as an example, we demonstrate how we can use mobile phone call detail record (CDR) data, which contains millions of anonymous users, to extract individual mobility networks comparable to the activity-based approach. Such an approach is widely used in the transportation planning practice to develop urban micro simulations of individual daily activities and travel; yet it depends highly on detailed travel survey data to capture individual activity-based behavior. We provide an innovative data mining framework that synthesizes the state-of-the-art techniques in...

Toward Temporal Realism in City-Scale Crisis Response Simulation using LLM Agents

Zhang, Anping
Tan, Yang
Tang, Yuanbo
Tang, Huaze
Ye, Qiuhua
Marta Gonzalez
Li, Yang
2026

Human collective participation is rarely steady in time: it is bursty, with short episodes of intense activity separated by long quiet intervals. In crisis response and community mobilization, predicting when people act matters as much as predicting whether they act. Such settings are increasingly modeled with LLM-based social simulators, yet these simulators are validated on whether each action is individually plausible, not on whether actions are timed as in reality. Their temporal realism, the degree to which simulated activity reproduces the bursty, heavy-tailed timing of real human...

Public Health Sector Influence in Transportation Decision-Making: The Case of Health Impact Assessment

Carolyn McAndrews
Elizabeth Deakin
2020

Health impact assessment (HIA) is a method of analyzing and communicating the potential health-related outcomes of policies and projects in a variety of fields, including transportation. The transportation policy process already has formal routines to incorporate information about air quality, noise, safety, and other health issues. However, the HIA method could broaden the set of issues under consideration (e.g., physical activity), the types of decisions assessed, and the actors involved. In theory, HIA seeks to influence transportation decisions and serve as a platform for public...

Intelligent Transport Systems

Elizabeth Deakin
Karen Trapenberg Frick
Alexander Skabardonis
2004

If you've seen an electronic massage sign along the highway that tells you how long it will take to get downtown or to the airport, or paid your toll or your parking fees with an electronic tag, or ridden a bus that triggered the traffic lights to turn green as it approached them, then you have experienced some of the benefits of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)—an umbrella term for a variety of new technologies and operations methods for highways and transit. Other on-the-ground ITS applications are less visible to the average traveler, but every bit as useful: they help traffic...

Risk Assessment and Risk Management for Transportation Research

Elizabeth Deakin
Karen Trapenberg Frick
Kathleen Phu
2014

This paper sets forth a preliminary methodology to assess and manage risk for transportation research. The California Dept. of Transportation (Caltrans) funds numerous transportation research projects that range from studies that aim to improve the understanding of travel behavior to field operations tests and deployment studies for new technologies. The risk assessment methodology is designed to help 1) identify needs for transportation research, 2) identify likely audiences for the anticipated research products, as well as potential applications; 3) identify potential barriers that could...

Vehicle Technologies for Achieving Near and Longer Term Fuel Economy and Climate Goals

Tim Lipman
2020
Motor vehicles are a key element of transport systems worldwide, providing vitally important access to goods and services. However, motor vehicles powered by internal combustion engines directly emit harmful pollutants and climate-changing gases. New fuels and new automotive technologies offer the potential to simultaneously make motor vehicles much cleaner and more efficient by reducing tailpipe emissions and allowing the focus to be on the “upstream” emissions from fuels production. This can be accomplished through an increasing array of hybrid electric and pure electric...

Analysis of The Combined Vehicle-and Post‐Vehicle-Use Value of Lithium‐Ion Plug-In-Vehicle Propulsion Batteries

Brett Williams
Tim Lipman
2011

Advances in electric-drive technology, including lithium-ion batteries, as well as the development of strong policy drivers such as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, now contribute to a more promising market environment for the widespread introduction of plug-in vehicles in California. Nevertheless, battery costs remain high and uncertain, presenting significant hurdles to commercialization. This report builds upon previous research (CEC-500-2009-091) investigating the potential reduction in plug-in-hybrid battery lease payments that incorporation of value from postvehicle...

The CO2 Abatement Potential of California's Mid-Sized Commericial Buildings

Michael Stadler
Chris Marnay
Gonçalo Cardoso
Tim Lipman
Olivier Mégel
Srirupa Ganguly
Afzal Siddiqui
Judy Lai
2009

The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is working with the California Energy Commission (CEC) to determine the potential role of commercial sector distributed generation (DG) with combined heat and power (CHP) capability deployment in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reductions. CHP applications at large industrial sites are well known, and a large share of their potential has already been harvested. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential of medium-sized commercial buildings, i.e. ones with peak electric loads ranging from 100 kW to 5...