Tradable network permits: A new scheme for the most efficient use of network capacity

Akamatsu et al. (2006) proposed a new transportation demand management scheme called “tradable bottleneck permits” (TBP), and proved its efficiency properties for a single bottleneck model. This paper explores the properties of a TBP system for general networks. An equilibrium model is first constructed to describe the states under the TBP system with a single OD pair. It is proved that equilibrium resource allocation is efficient in the sense that the total transportation cost in a network is minimized. It is also shown that the “self-financing principle” holds for the TBP system. Furthermore, theoretical relationships between TBP and congestion pricing (CP) are discussed. It is demonstrated that TBP has definite advantages over CP when demand information is not perfect, whereas both TBP and CP are equivalent for the perfect information case. Finally, it is shown that the efficiency result also holds for more general demand conditions.     

基于BP网络的球鼻首参数化优化

本文以某集装箱船为研究对象,对降速航行后的球鼻首进行优化。采用Catia建立船体三维模型,为了产生不同形状的球鼻首,选取球鼻特征参数来描述其基本结构;采用拉丁超立方试验抽样方法得到12组不同形状的球鼻首,提出运用非线性拟合能力较强的BP网络构建球鼻首参数和阻力系数之间的关系模型;采用遗传算法对训练后的网络进行极值寻优。结果显示,优化船型的阻力系数显著降低,说明该方法对球鼻首的优化有一定的借鉴意义。     

Large-scale dynamic transportation network simulation: A space-time-event parallel computing approach

This paper describes a computationally efficient parallel-computing framework for mesoscopic transportation simulation on large-scale networks. By introducing an overall data structure for mesoscopic dynamic transportation simulation, we discuss a set of implementation issues for enabling flexible parallel computing on a multi-core shared memory architecture. First, we embed an event-based simulation logic to implement a simplified kinematic wave model and reduce simulation overhead. Second, we present a space-time-event computing framework to decompose simulation steps to reduce communication overhead in parallel execution and an OpenMP-based space-time-processor implementation method that is used to automate task partition tasks. According to the spatial and temporal attributes, various types of simulation events are mapped to independent logical processes that can concurrently execute their procedures while maintaining good load balance. We propose a synchronous space-parallel simulation strategy to dynamically assign the logical processes to different threads. The proposed method is then applied to simulate large-scale, real-world networks to examine the computational efficiency under different numbers of CPU threads. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the implemented parallel computing algorithm can significantly improve the computational efficiency and it can reach up to a speedup of 10 on a workstation with 32 computing threads.     

Forecasting current and next trip purpose with social media data and Google Places

Trip purpose is crucial to travel behavior modeling and travel demand estimation for transportation planning and investment decisions. However, the spatial-temporal complexity of human activities makes the prediction of trip purpose a challenging problem. This research, an extension of work by Ermagun et al. (2017) and Meng et al. (2017), addresses the problem of predicting both current and next trip purposes with both Google Places and social media data. First, this paper implements a new approach to match points of interest (POIs) from the Google Places API with historical Twitter data. Therefore, the popularity of each POI can be obtained. Additionally, a Bayesian neural network (BNN) is employed to model the trip dependence on each individual’s daily trip chain and infer the trip purpose. Compared with traditional models, it is found that Google Places and Twitter information can greatly improve the overall accuracy of prediction for certain activities, including “EatOut”, “Personal”, “Recreation” and “Shopping”, but not for “Education” and “Transportation”. In addition, trip duration is found to be an important factor in inferring activity/trip purposes. Further, to address the computational challenge in the BNN, an elastic net is implemented for feature selection before the classification task. Our research can lead to three types of possible applications: activity-based travel demand modeling, survey labeling assistance, and online recommendations.     

Mental models of driving and speed: biases,choices and reality

This paper provides a review of research performed by Svenson with colleagues and others work on mental models and their practical implications. Mental models describe how people perceive and think about the world including covariances and relationships between different variables, such as driving speed and time. Research on mental models has detected the time-saving bias [Svenson, O. (1970). A functional measurement approach to intuitive estimation as exemplified by estimated time savings. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 86, 204–210]. It means that drivers relatively overestimate the time that can be saved by increasing speed from an already high speed, for example, 90–130?km/h, and underestimate the time that can be saved by increasing speed from a low speed, for example, 30–45?km/h. In congruence with this finding, mean speed judgments and perceptions of mean speeds are also biased and higher speeds given too much weight and low speeds too little weight in comparison with objective reality. Replacing or adding a new speedometer in the car showing min per km eliminated or weakened the time-saving bias. Information about braking distances at different speeds did not improve overoptimistic judgments of braking capacity, but information about collision speed with an object suddenly appearing on the road did improve judgments of braking capacity. This is relevant to drivers, politicians and traffic regulators.     

A copula-based approach for estimating the travel time reliability of urban arterial

Estimating the travel time reliability (TTR) of urban arterial is critical for real-time and reliable route guidance and provides theoretical bases and technical support for sophisticated traffic management and control. The state-of-art procedures for arterial TTR estimation usually assume that path travel time follows a certain distribution, with less consideration about segment correlations. However, the conventional approach is usually unrealistic because an important feature of urban arterial is the dependent structure of travel times on continuous segments. In this study, a copula-based approach that incorporates the stochastic characteristics of segments travel time is proposed to model arterial travel time distribution (TTD), which serves as a basis for TTR quantification. First, segments correlation is empirically analyzed and different types of copula models are examined. Then, fitting marginal distributions for segment TTD is conducted by parametric and non-parametric regression analysis, respectively. Based on the estimated parameters of the models, the best-fitting copula is determined in terms of the goodness-of-fit tests. Last, the model is examined at two study sites with AVI data and NGSIM trajectory data, respectively. The results of path TTD estimation demonstrate the advantage of the proposed copula-based approach, compared with the convolution model without capturing segments correlation and the empirical distribution fitting methods. Furthermore, when considering the segments correlation effect, it was found that the estimated path TTR is more accurate than that by the convolution model.     

A hybrid deep learning based traffic flow prediction method and its understanding

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently demonstrated the capability to predict traffic flow with big data. While existing DNN models can provide better performance than shallow models, it is still an open issue of making full use of spatial-temporal characteristics of the traffic flow to improve their performance. In addition, our understanding of them on traffic data remains limited. This paper proposes a DNN based traffic flow prediction model (DNN-BTF) to improve the prediction accuracy. The DNN-BTF model makes full use of weekly/daily periodicity and spatial-temporal characteristics of traffic flow. Inspired by recent work in machine learning, an attention based model was introduced that automatically learns to determine the importance of past traffic flow. The convolutional neural network was also used to mine the spatial features and the recurrent neural network to mine the temporal features of traffic flow. We also showed through visualization how DNN-BTF model understands traffic flow data and presents a challenge to conventional thinking about neural networks in the transportation field that neural networks is purely a “black-box” model. Data from open-access database PeMS was used to validate the proposed DNN-BTF model on a long-term horizon prediction task. Experimental results demonstrated that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.     

Connectivity analysis of the global shipping network by eigenvalue decomposition

ABSTRACT

Maritime shipping necessitates flexible and cost-effective port access worldwide through the global shipping network. This paper presents an efficient method to identify major port communities, and analyses the network connectivity of the global shipping network based on community structure. The global shipping network is represented by a signless Laplacian matrix which can be decomposed to generate its eigenvectors and corresponding eigenvalues. The largest gaps between the eigenvalues were then used to determine the optimal number of communities within the network. The eigenvalue decomposition method offers the advantage of detecting port communities without relying on a priori assumption about the number of communities and the size of each community. By applying this method to a dataset collected from seven world leading liner shipping companies, we found that the ports are clustered into three communities in the global container shipping network, which is consistent with the major container trade routes. The sparse linkages between port communities indicate where access is relatively poor.     

客车捎带模式下高铁快捷货物输送方案研究

以提高高铁快运当日达产品的时效性、收益率为核心,对既有载客动车组捎带模式下的快捷货物输送方案进行优化。借助时空网络以列车运行成本与时间惩罚费用之和最小为目标,同时满足货主时限、列车容量以及列车停站方案等约束,建立输送方案优化模型,通过匈牙利算法,并借助Matlab的Yalmip工具箱求解模型。以兰州西站至天水南站、宝鸡南站及西安北站部分时间段的快捷货物运输需求为背景进行算例分析,验证模型的有效性。结果表明合理估算列车装载容量及货物的延迟时限对输送方案的选择起重要作用。     

基于客流需求的城市轨道交通动态时刻表优化模型

为使城市轨道交通列车运行时刻表更贴合客流需求,依据不断变化的客流需求确定每列车的发车时刻和停站时间,采用多目标优化方法构建以乘客出行时间费用和列车运行时间费用最小为目标、列车发车时刻和停站时间为决策变量的城市轨道交通动态时刻表优化模型,并采用粒子群算法求解。以广州地铁13号线为例进行验证,结果表明优化后的时刻表更满足客流需求,能有效地提高乘客出行效率,具有更好的动态适应性。