An Exploration of the Relationship between Timing and Duration of Maintenance Activities

The timing and duration of an activity episode are two important temporal aspects of activity-travel behavior. Understanding the causal relationship between these two variables would be useful in the development of activity-based travel demand modeling systems. This paper investigates the relationship between these two variables by considering two different causal structures – one structure in which time-of-day choice is determined first and influences duration and a second structure in which activity duration is determined first and affects time-of-day choice. These two structures are estimated within a discrete-continuous simultaneous equations framework employing a full-information maximum likelihood methodology that allows error covariance. The estimation is performed separately for commuter and non-commuter samples drawn from a 1996 household travel survey data set from the Tampa Bay area in Florida. The results of the model estimation effort show that the causal structure in which activity duration precedes or affects activity timing (time of day choice) performs better for the non-commuter sample. For the commuter sample, the findings were less conclusive with both causal structures offering equally good statistical measures of fit. In addition, for the commuter sample, all error correlations were found to be zero. These two findings suggest that time of day choice and activity episode duration are only loosely related for the commuter sample, possibly due to the relatively non-discretionary and inflexible work activity and travel.     

基于数据挖掘的城市机动车停车调查分析研究

进行城市机动车停车场规划前需要开展停车场调查,以得到停车场的基本特征参数、机动车进出记录和停车者的停车行为等信息。通过数据挖掘中的一些方法可以在数据库中挖掘出有用的信息。根据机动车进出停车场的记录计算一系列的停车指标,并借助多元统计分析中典型相关分析的方法,分析停车指标与停车场基本特征参数之间的关系。然后利用关联规则挖掘停车问询调查数据中的潜在信息,分析停车者的行为特征,以掌握更多的停车信息。     

跟驰过程中驾驶员认知结构模型的建立

在道路交通4要素中(人、车、路、环境),人以其主动性和智慧性起着支配作用,是其中的主体要素。基于认知心理学的有关知识,论文采用因子分析法对五轮仪实验系统观测到的车辆跟驰数据进行分析,确定了对车辆跟驰信息提取过程有独立作用的4个因素,相应地将驾驶员认知过程划分为4个阶段,建立了车辆跟驰过程的驾驶员认知结构模型。为驾驶行为研究和车辆跟驰模型的建立提供了理论基础。     

Implementation and application of a stochastic aircraft boarding model

The aircraft turnaround processes is mainly controlled by the ground handling, airport or airline staff, except the aircraft boarding, which is driven by the passengers’ experience and willingness or ability to follow the proposed boarding procedures. The paper uses a prior developed, calibrated, stochastic aircraft boarding model, which is applied to different boarding strategies (chronological order of passenger arrival, hand luggage handling), group constellations and innovative infrastructural changes (Flying Carpet, Side-Slip Seat, Foldable Passenger Seat). In this context, passenger boarding is assumed to be a stochastic, agent-based, forward-directed, one-dimensional and discrete process. The stochastic model covers individual passenger behavior as well as operational constraints and deviations. A comprehensive assessment using one model allows for efficient comparison of current research approaches and innovative operational solutions for efficient passenger boarding.     

多车道高速公路出口开口段安全特性分析

为研究不同断面形式下的多车道高速公路出口影响区开口长度及流量与交通安全的关系，针对2种断面形式的高速公路出口，分别设计了3种不同的开口长度，结合3种不同流量条件设计了18个不同的驾驶模拟场景。实验招募30名被试者开展模拟驾驶实验，提取不同开口长度及流量条件下各断面形式高速公路出口的车辆行驶轨迹、换道间隙的选择、减速度、最小 TTC (Time to Collision)等驾驶行为特性参数，综合分析基于驾驶行为数据对不同开口长度的行车风险。结果表明：两种断面形式下，开口长度对于车辆在开口段上的换道点选择存在显著影响；两种断面形式下，1500 m的开口长度能够满足绝大多数驾驶人的换道需求；在换道间隙选择中，大都集中在5~6 s，分离式断面下的开口长度对于低于临界间隙的换道间隙出现的频次具有显著影响；流量及开口长度对于最大减速度及TTC最小值和分布位置均不存在显著性影响，但分离式断面下的最大减速度和最小TTC相较于整体式断面更小；此外，整体式断面中内侧3车道的行车风险低于分离式断面，分离式断面中外侧车道的行车风险低于整体式断面。     

Vehicle kilometers traveled reduction impacts of Transit-Oriented Development: Evidence from Shanghai City

The role of residential self-selection has become a major subject in the debate over the relationships between the built environment and travel behavior. Numerous previous empirical studies on this subject have provided valuable insights into the associations between the built environment and travel behavior. However, the vast majority of the studies were conducted in North American and European cities; yet this research is still in its infancy in most developing countries, including China, where residential and transport choices are likely to be more constrained and travel-related attitudes quite different from those in the developed world. Using the data collected from 2038 residents currently living in TOD neighborhoods and non-TOD neighborhoods in Shanghai City, this paper aims to partly fill the gaps by investigating the causal relationship between the built environment and travel behavior in the Chinese context. More specifically, this paper employs Heckman’s sample selection model to examine the reduction impacts of TOD on personal vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT), controlling for self-selection. The results show that whilst the effects of residential self-selection are apparent; the built environment exhibits the most significant impacts on travel behavior, playing the dominant role. These findings produce a sound basis for local policymakers to better understand the nature and magnitude toward the impacts of the built environment on travel behavior. Providing the government department with reassurance that effective interventions and policies on land use aimed toward altering the built environment would actually lead to meaningful changes in travel behavior.     

Potentials of using social media to infer the longitudinal travel behavior: A sequential model-based clustering method

This study explores the possibility of employing social media data to infer the longitudinal travel behavior. The geo-tagged social media data show some unique features including location-aggregated features, distance-separated features, and Gaussian distributed features. Compared to conventional household travel survey, social media data is less expensive, easier to obtain and the most importantly can monitor the individual’s longitudinal travel behavior features over a much longer observation period. This paper proposes a sequential model-based clustering method to group the high-resolution Twitter locations and extract the Twitter displacements. Further, this study details the unique features of displacements extracted from Twitter including the demographics of Twitter user, as well as the advantages and limitations. The results are even compared with those from traditional household travel survey, showing promises in using displacement distribution, length, duration and start time to infer individual’s travel behavior. On this basis, one can also see the potential of employing social media to infer longitudinal travel behavior, as well as a large quantity of short-distance Twitter displacements. The results will supplement the traditional travel survey and support travel behavior modeling in a metropolitan area.     

Identifying tourists and analyzing spatial patterns of their destinations from location-based social media data

Reliable travel behavior data is a prerequisite for transportation planning process. In large tourism dependent cities, tourists are the most dynamic population group whose size and travel choices remain unknown to planners. Traditional travel surveys generally observe resident travel behavior and rarely target tourists. Ubiquitous uses of social media platforms in smartphones have created a tremendous opportunity to gather digital traces of tourists at a large scale. In this paper, we present a framework on how to use location-based data from social media to gather and analyze travel behavior of tourists. We have collected data of about 67,000 users from Twitter using its search interface for Florida. We first propose several filtering steps to create a reliable sample from the collected Twitter data. An ensemble classification technique is proposed to classify tourists and residents from user coordinates. The accuracy of the proposed classifier has been compared against the state-of-the-art classification methods. Finally, different clustering methods have been used to find the spatial patterns of destination choices of tourists. Promising results have been found from the output clusters as they reveal most popular tourist spots as well as some of the emerging tourist attractions in Florida. Performance of the proposed clustering techniques has been assessed using internal clustering validation indices. We have analyzed temporal patterns of tourist and resident activities to validate the classification of the users in two separate groups of tourists and residents. Proposed filtering, identification, and clustering techniques will be significantly useful for building individual-level tourist travel demand models from social media data.     

A two-dimensional simulation model for modelling turning vehicles at mixed-flow intersections

The turning behavior is one of the most challenging driving maneuvers under non-protected phase at mixed-flow intersections. Currently, one-dimensional simulation models focus on car-following and gap-acceptance behaviors in pre-defined lanes with few lane-changing behaviors, and they cannot model the lateral and longitudinal behaviors simultaneously, which has limitation in representing the realistic turning behavior. This paper proposes a three-layered “plan-decision-action” (PDA) framework to obtain acceleration and angular velocity in the turning process. The plan layer firstly calculates the two-dimensional optimal path and dynamically adjusts the trajectories according to interacting objects. The decision layer then uses the decision tree method to select a suitable behavior in three alternatives: car-following, turning and yielding. Finally, in the action layer, a set of corresponding operational models specify the decided behavior into control parameters. The proposed model is tested by reproducing 210 trajectories of left-turn vehicles at a two-phase mixed-flow intersection in Shanghai. As a result, the simulation reproduces the variation of trajectories, while the coverage rate of the trajectories is 88.8%. Meanwhile, both the travel time and post-encroachment time of simulation and empirical turning vehicles are similar and do not show statistically significant difference.     

Fast-charging station choice behavior among battery electric vehicle users

This study explores how battery electric vehicle users choose where to fast-charge their vehicles from a set of charging stations, as well as the distance by which they are generally willing to detour for fast-charging. The focus is on fast-charging events during trips that include just one fast-charge between origin and destination in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Mixed logit models with and without a threshold effect for detour distance are applied to panel data extracted from a two-year field trial on battery electric vehicle usage in Japan. Findings from the mixed logit model with threshold show that private users are generally willing to detour up to about 1750 m on working days and 750 m on non-working days, while the distance is 500 m for commercial users on both working and non-working days. Users in general prefer to charge at stations requiring a shorter detour and use chargers located at gas stations, and are significantly affected by the remaining charge. Commercial users prefer to charge at stations encountered earlier along their paths, while only private users traveling on working days show such preference and they turn to prefer the stations encountered later when choosing a station in peak hours. Only private users traveling on working days show a strong preference for free charging. Commercial users tend to pay for charging at a station within 500 m detour distance. The fast charging station choice behavior is heterogeneous among users. These findings provide a basis for early planning of a public fast charging infrastructure.