No Arabic abstract
To alleviate traffic congestion, a variety of route guidance strategies has been proposed for intelligent transportation systems. A number of the strategies are proposed and investigated on a symmetric two-route traffic system over the past decade. To evaluate the strategies in a more general scenario, this paper conducts eight prevalent strategies on a asymmetric two-route traffic network with different slowdown behaviors on alternative routes. The results show that only mean velocity feedback strategy is able to equalize travel time, i.e., approximate user optimality; while the others fail due to incapability of establishing relations between the feedback parameters and travel time. The paper helps better understand these strategies, and suggests mean velocity feedback strategy if the authority intends to achieve user optimality.
We model and study the problem of assigning traffic in an urban road network infrastructure. In our model, each driver submits their intended destination and is assigned a route to follow that minimizes the social cost (i.e., travel distance of all the drivers). We assume drivers are strategic and try to manipulate the system (i.e., misreport their intended destination and/or deviate from the assigned route) if they can reduce their travel distance by doing so. Such strategic behavior is highly undesirable as it can lead to an overall suboptimal traffic assignment and cause congestion. To alleviate this problem, we develop moneyless mechanisms that are resilient to manipulation by the agents and offer provable approximation guarantees on the social cost obtained by the solution. We then empirically test the mechanisms studied in the paper, showing that they can be effectively used in practice in order to compute manipulation resistant traffic allocations.
Formation of consensus, in binary yes/no type of voting, is a well defined process. However, even in presence of clear incentives, the dynamics involved can be incredibly complex. Specifically, formations of large groups of similarly opinionated individuals could create a condition of `support-bubbles or spontaneous polarization that renders consensus virtually unattainable (e.g., the question of the UK exiting the EU). There have been earlier attempts in capturing the dynamics of consensus formation in societies through simple $Z_2$-symmetric models hoping to capture the essential dynamics of average behaviorof a large number of individuals in a statistical sense. However, in absence of external noise, they tend to reach a frozen state with fragmented and polarized states i.e., two or more groups of similarly opinionated groups with frozen dynamics. Here we show in a kinetic exchange opinion model (KEM) considered on $L times L$ square lattices, that while such frozen states could be avoided, an exponentially slow approach to consensus is manifested. Specifically, the system could either reach consensus in a time that scales as $L^2$ or a long lived metastable state (termed a domain-wall state) for which formation of consensus takes a time scaling as $L^{3.6}$. The latter behavior is comparable to some voter-like models with intermediate states studied previously. The late-time anomaly in the time scale is reflected in the persistence probability of the model. Finally, the interval of zero-crossing of the average opinion i.e., the time interval over which the average opinion does not change sign is shown to follow a scale free distribution, which is compared with that seen in the opinion surveys regarding Brexit and associated issues in the last 40 years. The issue of minority spreading is also addressed by calculating the exit probability.
Understanding human mobility is an important aspect of traffic analysis and urban planning. Trajectories provide detailed views on specific routes, but typically do not capture all traffic. Loop detectors capture all traffic flow at specific locations instead, but provide no information on individual routes. Given a set of loop-detector measurements and a set of representative trajectories, our goal is to investigate how one can effectively combine these two partial data sources to create a more complete picture of the underlying mobility. Specifically, we want to reconstruct a realistic set of routes from the loop-detector data, using the given trajectories as representatives of typical behavior. We model loop-detector data as a network flow that needs to be covered by the reconstructed routes and we capture realism of the routes via the Frechet distance to the representatives. We prove that several forms of the resulting problem are NP-hard. Hence we explore heuristics that decompose the flow well while following the representatives to varying degrees. First we propose the Frechet Routes (FR) heuristic which generates candidates routes with bounded Frechet distance. Second we describe a variant of multi-commodity min-cost flow (MCMCF) which is loosely coupled to the trajectories. Lastly we consider global min-cost flow (GMCF) which is essentially agnostic to the representatives. We evaluate these approaches on synthetic and real-world trajectory data with a map-matched ground truth. We find that GMCF explains the flow best, but produces a large number of routes (significantly more than the ground truth); these routes are often nonsensical. MCMCF produces a large number of mostly realistic routes which explain the flow reasonably well. In contrast, FR produces significantly smaller sets of realistic routes that still explain the flow well, albeit with a higher running time.
Variable message sign (VMS) is an effective traffic management tool for congestion mitigation. The VMS is primarily used as a means of providing factual travel information or genuine route guidance to travelers. However, this may be rendered sub-optimal on a network level by potential network paradoxes and lack of consideration for its cascading effect on the rest of the network. This paper focuses on the design of optimal display strategy of VMS in response to real-time traffic information and its coordination with other intelligent transportation systems such as signal control, in order to explore the full potential of real-time route guidance in combating congestion. We invoke the linear decision rule framework to design the optimal on-line VMS strategy, and test its effectiveness in conjunction with on-line signal control. A simulation case study is conducted on a real-world test network in China, which shows the advantage of the proposed adaptive VMS display strategy over genuine route guidance, as well as its synergies with on-line signal control for congestion mitigation.
A large number of complex systems, naturally emerging in various domains, are well described by directed networks, resulting in numerous interesting features that are absent from their undirected counterparts. Among these properties is a strong non-normality, inherited by a strong asymmetry that characterizes such systems and guides their underlying hierarchy. In this work, we consider an extensive collection of empirical networks and analyze their structural properties using information theoretic tools. A ubiquitous feature is observed amongst such systems as the level of non-normality increases. When the non-normality reaches a given threshold, highly directed substructures aiming towards terminal (sink or source) nodes, denoted here as leaders, spontaneously emerge. Furthermore, the relative number of leader nodes describe the level of anarchy that characterizes the networked systems. Based on the structural analysis, we develop a null model to capture features such as the aforementioned transition in the networks ensemble. We also demonstrate that the role of leader nodes at the pinnacle of the hierarchy is crucial in driving dynamical processes in these systems. This work paves the way for a deeper understanding of the architecture of empirical complex systems and the processes taking place on them.