Intelligent Transportation Systems

How Much GPS Data Do We Need?

Patire, Anthony D.
Wright, Mathew
Prodhomme, Boris
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2015

With the rapid growth of communications technologies, GPS, and the mobile internet, an increasing amount of real-time location information is collected by private companies and could be marketed for retail. This body of data offers transportation agencies potential opportunities to improve operations, but it also presents unique challenges. This article investigates the question of how much GPS data is needed to power a traffic information system capable of providing accurate speed (and thus travel time) information. A hybrid data framework is proposed to use real-time, GPS-based, point-...

Guest Editorial Special Section on Control and Automation From the 2015 International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS)

Mitchell, Ian M.
Koutsoukos, Xenofon
Branicky, Michael
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2016

The papers included in this special section were presented at the Sixth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS 2015) that was held on April 14-16, 2015 in Seattle, WA, USA, as part of the Eighth Annual Cyber-Physical Systems Week. ICCPS is the premier single-track conference for reporting advances in all aspects of cyber-physical systems, including theory, tools, applications, systems, testbeds, and field deployments. Its focus includes the core science and technology for developing fundamental principles that underpin the integration of cyber and...

Future Road Transportation Technology

Wang, Junhua
Iwasaki, Randy
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Harvey, John
2016

As road transportation brings us great life changes, it also brings safety and environment problems. Near one million people died in road accidents each year and road constructions consumed un-countable ...

Improving Disruption Management With Multimodal Collaborative Decision-Making: A Case Study of the Asiana Crash and Lessons Learned

Marzuoli, Aude
Boidot, Emmanuel
Colomar, Pablo
Guerpillon, Mathieu
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2016

Transportation networks constitute a critical infrastructure enabling the transfers of passengers and goods, with a significant impact on the economy at different scales. Transportation modes are coupled and interdependent. The frequent occurrence of perturbations on one or several modes disrupts passengers' entire journeys, directly and through ripple effects. Collaborative decision-making has shown significant benefits at the airport level, both in the U.S. and in Europe. This paper examines how it could be extended to the multimodal network level, discusses the supporting evidence, and...

Negative Externalities of GPS-enabled Routing Applications: A Game Theoretical Approach

Thai, Jérôme
Laurent-Brouty, Nicolas
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2016

This work studies the impact of the increasing penetration of routing apps on road usage. Its conclusions apply both to manned vehicles in which human drivers follow app directions, and unmanned vehicles following shortest path algorithms. To address the problem caused by the increased usage of routing apps, we model two distinct classes of users, one having limited knowledge of low-capacity road links. This approach is in sharp contrast with some previous studies assuming that each user has full knowledge of the network and optimizes his/her own travel time. We show that the increased...

Intelligent Transportation Systems and Infrastructure A Series of Briefs for Smart Investments

Bayen, Alexandre M.
Shastry, Shankar
2017

The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented convergence of communication, control, and sensing that can potentially transform transportation infrastructure and delivery. At the most basic level, efficient operation and maintenance of our nation’s transportation infrastructure requires real time data exchange provided by intelligent transportation system technology. When implemented, these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the nation’s economic vitality by moving people and goods more quickly, efficiently, safely, and at lower cost to consumers.

Integration of Information Patterns in the Modeling and Design of Mobility Management Services

Keimer, Alexander
Laurent-Brouty, Nicolas
Farokhi, Farhad
Signargout, Hippolyte
Cvetkovic, Vladimir
Bayen, Alexandre M.
Johansson, Karl H.
2017

Over the last decade, the rise of the mobile internet and the usage of mobile devices has enabled ubiquitous traffic information. With the increased adoption of specific smartphone applications, the number of users of routing applications has become large enough to disrupt traffic flow patterns in a significant manner. Similarly, but at a slightly slower pace, novel services for freight transportation and city logistics improve the efficiency of goods transportation and change the use of road infrastructure. The present article provides a general four-layer framework for modeling these new...

The Impact of GPS-Enabled Shortest Path Routing on Mobility: A Game Theoretic Approach

Cabannes, Theophile
Vincentelli, Marco Antonio Sangiovanni
Sundt, Alexander
Signargout, Hippolyte
Porter, Emily
Bayen, Alexandre
2018

This article investigates the impact of app use on traffic patterns. With ubiquity of traffic information and the increased use of routing apps, urban and suburban areas in the US have seen a recent rise in “cut-through” traffic and related congestion patterns. This increase is suspected to be both an instantaneous phenomenon (a natural response of routing apps to special events, accidents, or other problems reducing capacity locally in transportation networks) and a trend (progressive increase of such traffic over time, with a corresponding shift in demand on the transportation...

Imputing a Variational Inequality Function or a Convex Objective Function: A Robust Approach

Thai, Jérôme
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2018

To impute the function of a variational inequality and the objective of a convex optimization problem from observations of (nearly) optimal decisions, previous approaches constructed inverse programming methods based on solving a convex optimization problem [17], [7]. However, we show that, in addition to requiring complete observations, these approaches are not robust to measurement errors, while in many applications, the outputs of decision processes are noisy and only partially observable from, e.g., limitations in the sensing infrastructure. To deal with noisy and missing data, we...

Variance Reduction for Policy Gradient with Action-Dependent Factorized Baselines

Wu, Cathy
Rajeswaran, Aravind
Duan, Yan
Kumar, Vikash
Bayen, Alexandre M.
2018

Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional action spaces. To mitigate this issue, we derive a bias-free action-dependent baseline for variance reduction which fully exploits the structural form of the stochastic policy itself and does not make any additional assumptions about the MDP. We demonstrate and quantify the benefit of the action-dependent baseline through both theoretical analysis as...