Learning When to See for Long-term Traffic Data Collection on Power-constrained Devices

Collecting traffic data is crucial for transportation systems and urban planning, and is often more desirable through easy-to-deploy but power-constrained devices, due to the unavailability or high cost of power and network infrastructure. The limited power means an inevitable trade-off between data collection duration and accuracy/resolution. We introduce a novel learning-based framework that strategically decides observation timings for battery-powered devices and reconstructs the full data stream from sparsely sampled observations, resulting in minimal performance loss and a significantly prolonged system lifetime. Our framework comprises a predictor, a controller, and an estimator. The predictor utilizes historical data to forecast future trends within a fixed time horizon. The controller uses the forecasts to determine the next optimal timing for data collection. Finally, the estimator reconstructs the complete data profile from the sampled observations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on PeMS data by an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) predictor and estimator, and a DRQN (Deep Recurrent Q-Network) controller, and compare it against the baseline that uses Kalman filter and uniform sampling. The results indicate that our method outperforms the baseline, primarily due to the inclusion of more representative data points in the profile, resulting in an overall 10\% improvement in estimation accuracy. Source code will be publicly available.

Physics-informed Machine Learning for Calibrating Macroscopic Traffic Flow Models

Well-calibrated traffic flow models are fundamental to understanding traffic phenomena and designing control strategies. Traditional calibration has been developed base on optimization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel physics-informed, learning-based calibration approach that achieves performances comparable to and even better than those of optimization-based methods. To this end, we combine the classical deep autoencoder, an unsupervised machine learning model consisting of one encoder and one decoder, with traffic flow models. Our approach informs the decoder of the physical traffic flow models and thus induces the encoder to yield reasonable traffic parameters given flow and speed measurements. We also introduce the denoising autoencoder into our method so that it can handles not only with normal data but also with corrupted data with missing values. We verified our approach with a case study of I-210 E in California.

Agent-based Simulation Model and Deep Learning Techniques to Evaluate and Predict Transportation Trends around COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected travel behaviors and transportation system operations, and cities are grappling with what policies can be effective for a phased reopening shaped by social distancing. This edition of the white paper updates travel trends and highlights an agent-based simulation model's results to predict the impact of proposed phased reopening strategies. It also introduces a real-time video processing method to measure social distancing through cameras on city streets.

Using LDA and LSTM Models to Study Public Opinions and Critical Groups Towards Congestion Pricing in New York City through 2007 to 2019

This study explores how people view and respond to the proposals of NYC congestion pricing evolve in time. To understand these responses, Twitter data is collected and analyzed. Critical groups in the recurrent process are detected by statistically analyzing the active users and the most mentioned accounts, and the trends of people's attitudes and concerns over the years are identified with text mining and hybrid Nature Language Processing techniques, including LDA topic modeling and LSTM sentiment classification. The result shows that multiple interest groups were involved and played crucial roles during the proposal, especially Mayor and Governor, MTA, and outer-borough representatives. The public shifted the concern of focus from the plan details to a wider city's sustainability and fairness. Furthermore, the plan's approval relies on several elements, the joint agreement reached in the political process, strong motivation in the real-world, the scheme based on balancing multiple interests, and groups' awareness of tolling's benefits and necessity.

An Interactive Data Visualization and Analytics Tool to Evaluate Mobility and Sociability Trends During COVID-19

The COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically changed travel behavior in affected cities. The C2SMART research team has been investigating the impact of COVID-19 on mobility and sociability. New York City (NYC) and Seattle, two of the cities most affected by COVID-19 in the U.S. were included in our initial study. An all-in-one dashboard with data mining and cloud computing capabilities was developed for interactive data analytics and visualization to facilitate the understanding of the impact of the outbreak and corresponding policies such as social distancing on transportation systems. This platform is updated regularly and continues to evolve with the addition of new data, impact metrics, and visualizations to assist public and decision-makers to make informed decisions. This paper presents the architecture of the COVID related mobility data dashboard and preliminary mobility and sociability metrics for NYC and Seattle.

Dynamic Prediction of Origin-Destination Flows Using Fusion Line Graph Convolutional Networks

Modern intelligent transportation systems provide data that allow real-time demand prediction, which is essential for planning and operations. The main challenge of prediction of Origin-Destination (O-D) flow matrices is that demands cannot be directly measured by traffic sensors; instead, they have to be inferred from aggregate traffic flow data on traffic links. Specifically, spatial correlation, congestion and time dependent factors need to be considered in general transportation networks. In this paper we propose a novel O-D prediction framework based on Fusion Line Graph Convolutional Networks (FL-GCNs). We use FL-GCN to recognize spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously. The underlying road network topology is transformed into a corresponding line graph. This structure provides a general framework for predicting spatial-temporal O-D information from link traffic flows. Data from a New Jersey Turnpike network is used to evaluate the proposed model. The results show that FL-GCN can recognize spatial and temporal patterns. We also compare FL-GCN with Kalman filter; the results show that our model can outperform Kalman filter by 17.87% in predicting the whole O-D pairs.