Learning daily activity patterns with probabilistic grammars

Daily activity pattern is the reflection and abstraction of actual individual activity participation on daily basis. It carries information on activity type, frequency and sequence. Preference of daily activity patterns varies among population, and thus can be interpreted as personal life styles. This paper advances studies on human daily activity patterns by providing new perspective and methodology in the modeling and learning of daily activity patterns using probabilistic context-free grammars. In this paper, similarities between daily activity pattern—which is defined as activity sequence—and language are explored. We developed context-free grammars to parse and generate daily activity patterns. To replicate people’s heterogeneity in selecting daily activity patterns, we introduced probabilistic context-free grammars and proposed several formulations to estimate the probability of a context-free grammar with daily activity patterns observed in household travel survey. We conducted experiments on the proposed formulations, finding that under proper context-free grammar and problem formulation, the estimated probabilistic context-free grammar is able to reproduce the observed pattern distribution in household travel survey with satisfactory precision. Practically, the proposed methodology sheds light on the issue of generating stochastic and accessibility-dependent choice sets for daily activity pattern models in certain activity-based modeling frameworks.     

Investigating user perception on autonomous vehicle (AV) based mobility-on-demand (MOD) services in Singapore using the logit kernel approach

The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AV) in recent years has drawn the attention of numerous countries in terms of its feasibility for use and deployment as individually-owned vehicles or for large-scale fleet planning and deployment as a mobility-on-demand (MOD) service. Singapore is no exception to this global trend and in her pursuit to be smart and car-lite, numerous efforts are made to have AV trials in place and test out their potential deployment in the city state. As one of the many prerequisites of AV planning, public perception on AV plays a vital role when designing any potential AV deployment scheme. As such, a stated preference survey comprising both online survey and field interviews/surveys, was performed island-wide to understand how commuters in Singapore perceive about different AV-based MOD modes. The logit kernel model is adopted to determine how different preference attributes and key demographic indicators can affect the use of AV-based MOD services over other existing first- and last-mile connection modes. The model results have identified how demographics such as gender, age, housing type, education level and income level can influence the travel mode choice. Also, the impacts brought by individuals’ stated preferences over convenience, privacy and familiarity of ride-hailing apps are also investigated. Such findings can provide useful insight in planning future car-lite towns and implementing AV-based MOD services in these towns.