Real-time City Research Articles

Joint leisure travel optimization with user-generated data via perceived utility maximization

The lack of personalized solutions for managing the demand of joint leisure trips in cities in real time hinders the optimization of transportation system operations. Joint leisure activities can account for up to 60% of trips in cities and unlike fixed trips (i.e., trips to work where the arrival time and the trip destination are predefined), leisure activities offer more optimization flexibility since the activity destination and the arrival times of individuals can vary.To address this problem, a perceived utility model derived from non-traditional data such as smartphones/social media for representing users’ willingness to travel a certain distance for participating in leisure activities at different times of day is presented. Then, a stochastic annealing search method for addressing the exponential complexity optimization problem is introduced. The stochastic annealing method suggests the preferred location of a joint leisure activity and the arrival times of individuals based on the users’ preferences derived from the perceived utility model. Test-case implementations of the approach used 14-month social media data from London and showcased an increase of up to 3 times at individuals’ satisfaction while the computational complexity is reduced to almost linear time serving the real-time implementation requirements.

Intelligent Disaster Management System Based on CloudEnabled Vehicular Networks

The emergency response systems importance cannot be emphasized due to many manmade and natural disasters that occurred in the recent years. Disaster response and management has enabled transportation and telecommunications to play a major role in order to reduce loss of human life and economic cost and disruptions. VANET has been a great research which is helping in the design of an Intelligent Transportation System, which is proposed to target the road and passenger safety, by exchanging communication and warning messages. Cloud computing has been helping the world, in solving various real world problems with an increased performance and speed and always availability. Though VANET has proposed various ideologies in preventing accidents, nothing has actually been implemented in the real-world, adhering the ideologies of VANET. In this paper we leverage an intelligent disaster and emergency management system that would gather information from various sources from multiple locations including the incident point and make effective decision, and transfer the data to vehicles and other nodes. The efficacy of the system demonstrated through modeling the impact of a system disaster and various emergency responses on a real time city transport environment and correlating it with the disaster system was in place. By adopting the proposed system with improved and balanced traffic flow along with smooth evacuation we report better and effective results.