Intelligent Transportation Systems

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...

Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural ODE for Traffic Prediction

Zhong, Weiheng
Meidani, Hadi
Jane Macfarlane
2023

Traffic forecasting is an important issue in intelligent traffic systems (ITS). Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective deep learning models to capture the complex spatio-temporal dependency of traffic data, achieving ideal prediction performance. In this paper, we propose attention-based graph neural ODE (ASTGODE) that explicitly learns the dynamics of the traffic system, which makes the prediction of our machine learning model more explainable. Our model aggregates traffic patterns of different periods and has satisfactory performance on two real-world traffic data sets. The results...

Simulating the Impact of Dynamic Rerouting on Metropolitan-scale Traffic Systems

Chan, Cy
Kuncheria, Anu
Jane Macfarlane
2023

The rapid introduction of mobile navigation aides that use real-time road network information to suggest alternate routes to drivers is making it more difficult for researchers and government transportation agencies to understand and predict the dynamics of congested transportation systems. Computer simulation is a key capability for these organizations to analyze hypothetical scenarios; however, the complexity of transportation systems makes it challenging for them to simulate very large geographical regions, such as multi-city metropolitan areas. In this article, we describe enhancements...

Mobiliti: A Digital Twin for Regional Transportation Network Design and Evaluation

Jane Macfarlane
Babur, Ismaeel
Grieves, Michael
Hua, Edward Y.
2024

Mobiliti is introduced as a foundation for a Digital Twin for managing transportation systemsTransportation systems across metropolitan regions and for planning and designing urban networks. Regional transportation systemsTransportation systems consist of interconnected subnetworks, each governed by different municipalities. Although localization simplifies analysis, transportation projects must be evaluated within the context of the larger regional network due to their potential impacts on overall network performance. The computational challenges of simulating metropolitan networks are...

Light Rail System Safety Improvements Using ITS Technologies

Chira-chavala, Ted
Coifman, Ben
Empey, Dan
Mark Hansen
Lechner, Ed
Porter, Chris
1997

This report describes research which studied identifying and analyzing the effectiveness of countermeasures designed to reduce light rail crashes. Focus is in collisions with road vehicles at intersections. The light rail system for the Santa Clara County Transportation Agency in California served as the focus of the study.

Improving Transit Performance with Advanced Public Transportation System Technologies

Mark Hansen
Qureshi, Mohammad
Rydewski, Daniel
1994

This report identifies opportunities to improve transit performance using Advanced Public Transportation System (APTS) Technologies, assesses transit operator viewpoints on and experiences with APTS technologies, and proposes how current adoption and utilization practices might be improved so that these technologies are used in a more efficient and effective manner.The research consisted of three main phases. First, we identified APTS technologies and developed a framework for assessing their potential value in improving transit system performance. We considered three types of APTS...