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Transportation

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Urban Transportation

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Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng Jul 2012

Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng

Shih-Fen CHENG

Congestion games model a wide variety of real-world resource congestion problems, such as selfish network routing, traffic route guidance in congested areas, taxi fleet optimization and crowd movement in busy areas. However, existing research in congestion games assumes: (a) deterministic movement of agents between resources; and (b) perfect rationality (i.e. maximizing their own expected value) of all agents. Such assumptions are not reasonable in dynamic domains where decision support has to be provided to humans. For instance, in optimizing the performance of a taxi fleet serving a city, movement of taxis can be involuntary or nondeterministic (decided by the specific …


Decision Support For Agent Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Geoff Gordon, Asrar Ahmed Jun 2012

Decision Support For Agent Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Geoff Gordon, Asrar Ahmed

Shih-Fen CHENG

This research is motivated by large scale problems in urban transportation and labor mobility where there is congestion for resources and uncertainty in movement. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly interact with other agents, they effect other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed deterministic movements of agents. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents that are identical and have involuntary movements in dynamic environments. For instance, in a taxi fleet serving a city, …


Taxisim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform For Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen Jul 2011

Taxisim: A Multiagent Simulation Platform For Evaluating Taxi Fleet Operations, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thi Duong Nguyen

Shih-Fen CHENG

Taxi service is an important mode of public transportation in most metropolitan areas since it provides door-to-door convenience in the public domain. Unfortunately, despite all the convenience taxis bring, taxi fleets are also extremely inefficient to the point that over 50% of its operation time could be spent in idling state. Improving taxi fleet operation is an extremely challenging problem, not just because of its scale, but also due to fact that taxi drivers are self-interested agents that cannot be controlled centrally. To facilitate the study of such complex and decentralized system, we propose to construct a multiagent simulation platform …


A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu Sep 2009

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu

Shih-Fen CHENG

Taxi service has undergone radical revamp in recent years. In particular, significant investments in communication system and GPS devices have improved quality of taxi services through better dispatches. In this paper, we propose to leverage on such infrastructure and build a service choice model that helps individual drivers in deciding whether to serve a specific taxi stand or not. We demonstrate the value of our model by applying it to a real-world scenario. We also highlight interesting new potential approaches that could significantly improve the quality of taxi services.