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Urban public transit planning is crucial in reducing traffic congestion and enabling green transportation. However, there is no systematic way to integrate passengers' personal preferences in planning public transit routes and schedules so as to achieve high occupancy rates and efficiency gain of ride-sharing. In this paper, we take the first step tp exact passengers' preferences in planning from history public transit data. We propose a data-driven method to construct a Markov decision process model that characterizes the process of passengers making sequential public transit choices, in bus routes, subway lines, and transfer stops/stations. Using the model, we integrate softmax policy iteration into maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning to infer the passenger's reward function from observed trajectory data. The inferred reward function will enable an urban planner to predict passengers' route planning decisions given some proposed transit plans, for example, opening a new bus route or subway line. Finally, we demonstrate the correctness and accuracy of our modeling and inference methods in a large-scale (three months) passenger-level public transit trajectory data from Shenzhen, China. Our method contributes to smart transportation design and human-centric urban planning.
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Data-driven Bus Crowding Prediction Models Using Context-specific Features
Public transit is one of the first things that come to mind when someone talks about “smart cities.” As a result, many technologies, applications, and infrastructure have already been deployed to bring the promise of the smart city to public transportation. Most of these have focused on answering the question, “When will my bus arrive?”; little has been done to answer the question, “How full will my next bus be?” which also dramatically affects commuters’ quality of life. In this article, we consider the bus fullness problem. In particular, we propose two different formulations of the problem, develop multiple predictive models, and evaluate their accuracy using data from the Pittsburgh region. Our predictive models consistently outperform the baselines (by up to 8 times).
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739413
- PAR ID:
- 10229761
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2691-1922
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3406962
