Intelligent Transportation Systems

Quantifying Transit Travel Experiences from the Users’ Perspective with High-resolution Smartphone and Vehicle Location Data: Methodologies, Validation, and Example Analyses

Carrel, Andre
Lau, Peter S. C.
Mishalani, Rabi G.
Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2015

While transit agencies have increasingly adopted systems for collecting data on passengers and vehicles, the ability to derive high-resolution passenger trajectories and directly associate them with transit vehicles in a general and transferable manner remains a challenge. In this paper, a system of integrated methods is presented to reconstruct and track travelers usage of transit at a detailed level by matching location data from smartphones to automatic transit vehicle location (AVL) data and by identifying all out-of-vehicle and in-vehicle portions of the passengers trips. High-...

In Pursuit of the Happy Transit Rider: Dissecting Satisfaction Using Daily Surveys and Tracking Data

Carrel, Andre
Mishalani, Rabi G.
Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2016

This paper demonstrates the power and value of connecting satisfaction surveys from public transportation passengers to smartphone tracking data and automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. The high resolution of the smartphone location data allows travel times to be dissected into their individual components, and the connection with AVL data provides objective information on personal-level experiences of the respondents. Analyses show how these data can provide a quantitative understanding of the relationship between planned and provisioned service, and customer satisfaction. In-vehicle...

Drones in Smart Cities: Overcoming Barriers Through Air Traffic Control Research

Foina, Aislan Gomide
Raja Sengupta
Lerchi, Patrick
Liu, Zhilong
Krainer, Clemens
2015

Within the last decade, the recent automation of vehicles such as cars and planes promise to fundamentally alter the microeconomics of transporting people and goods. In this paper, we focus on the self-flying planes (drones), which have been renamed Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) by the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA). The most controversial operations envisaged by the UAS industry are small, low-altitude UAS flights in densely populated cities - robotic aircraft flying in the midst of public spaces to deliver goods and information. This subset of robotic flight would be the most valuable...

Cloud Computing in Space

Huang, Jiangchuan
Kirsch, Christoph M.
Raja Sengupta
2015

We apply virtual machine abstractions to networked vehicles, enabling what we call cloud computing in space to create performance isolation between customers. In analogy to conventional system virtualization and cloud computing, there are customer-operated virtual vehicles that essentially perform like real vehicles, although they are in reality hosted by fewer, shared, provider-operated real vehicles. The motion of the virtual vehicles and real vehicles creates migration gain. As a result, cloud computing in space can do better than conventional cloud computing in the sense of realizing...

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...

Research Brief: The Changing Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Individuals and Households in the U.S.

Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Parker, Madeleine
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Karen Trapenberg Frick
Daniel Rodriguez
Joan Walker
Raja Sengupta
Daniel Chatman
2021

This brief describes findings from a research effort to understand the changing impacts of the pandemic upon households from different places and backgrounds living in the United States. We investigated the effects of the pandemic along with pandemic-based restrictions and rules on people’s behavior along with their mental and emotional health, social relations, and livelihoods. Unlike other research efforts, as far as we are aware this effort is the only one to join passive data from cell phones with survey information collected from the same individuals over time. We combined these data...

Mobiliti: Scalable Transportation Simulation Using High-Performance Parallel Computing

Chan, Cy
Wang, Bin
Bachan, John
Jane Macfarlane
2018

Transportation systems are becoming increasingly complex with the evolution of emerging technologies, including deeper connectivity and automation, which will require more advanced control mechanisms for efficient operation (in terms of energy, mobility, and productivity). Stakeholders, including government agencies, industry, and local populations, all have an interest in efficient outcomes, yet there are few tools for developing a holistic understanding of urban dynamics. Simulating large-scale, high-fidelity transportation systems can help, but remains a challenging task, due to the...

Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting

Mallick, Tanwi
Balaprakash, Prasanna
Rask, Eric
Jane Macfarlane
2021

Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep- learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. These methods are specific to a given traffic network, however, and consequently they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network. Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural networks, (DCRNN), as a state-of- the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. It models the complex spatial and temporal...

The Transforming Transportation Ecosystem — A Call to Action

Jane Macfarlane
2019

The transportation landscape is in transition. Rising congestion, failing infrastructure, changing behaviors, adapting to a more inclusive definition of mobility, the desire for cleaner and more efficient engines, and grappling with the role of autonomous vehicles and drones, to name just some of the factors, demands that we take a fresh approach to designing for mobility. Yet the rapid pace of technology development is creating emerging trends that are driving change faster than our ability to model, design, and manage them. This could potentially result in undesirable economic,...

Differentially Private Map Matching for Mobility Trajectories

Haydari, Ammar
Chuah, Chen-Nee
Zhang, Michael
Jane Macfarlane
Peisert, Sean
2022

Human mobility trajectories provide valuable information for developing mobility applications, as they contain diverse and rich information about the users. User mobility data is valuable for various applications such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), commercial business models, and disease-spread models. However, such spatio-temporal traces may pose a threat to user privacy. GPS trajectories in their raw form are not suitable for transportation studies, as they require matching locations with nearest road links — a process called map-matching. This paper presents a differential...