Search

Hurricane Ian is the deadliest and costliest hurricane in Florida's history, with 2.5 million people ordered to evacuate. As we witness increasingly severe hurricanes in the context of climate change, mobile device location data offers an unprecedented opportunity to study hurricane evacuation behaviors. With a terabyte-level GPS dataset, we introduce a holistic hurricane evacuation behavior algorithm with a case study of Ian: we infer evacuees' departure time and categorize them into different behavioral groups, including self, voluntary, mandatory, shadow and in-zone evacuees. Results show the landfall area (Fort Myers, Lee County) had lower out-of-zone but higher overall evacuation rate, while the predicted landfall area (Tampa, Hillsborough County) had the opposite, suggesting the effects of delayed evacuation order. Out-of-zone evacuation rates would increase from shore to inland. Spatiotemporal analysis identified three evacuation waves: during formation, before landfall, and after landfall. These insights are valuable for enhancing future disaster planning and management.

Accurately assessing building damage is critical for disaster response and recovery. However, many existing models for detecting building damage have poor prediction accuracy due to their limited capabilities of identifying detailed, comprehensive structural and/or non-structural damage from the street-view image. Additionally, these models mainly rely on the imagery data for damage classification, failing to account for other critical information, such as wind speed, building characteristics, evacuation zones, and distance of the building to the hurricane track. To address these limitations, in this study, we propose a novel multi-modal (i.e., imagery and structured data) approach for post-hurricane building damage classification, named the Multi-Modal Swin Transformer (MMST). We empirically train and evaluate the proposed MMST using data collected from the 2022 Hurricane Ian in Florida, USA. Results show that MMST outperforms all selected state-of-the-art benchmark models and can achieve an accuracy of 92.67%, which are 7.71% improvement in accuracy compared to Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG-16). In addition to the street-view imagery data, building value, building age, and wind speed are the most important predictors for damage level classification. The proposed MMST can be deployed to assist in rapid damage assessment and guide reconnaissance efforts in future hurricanes.

Timely and accurate assessment of hurricane-induced building damage is crucial for effective post-hurricane response and recovery efforts. Recently, remote sensing technologies provide large-scale optical or Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) imagery data immediately after a disastrous event, which can be readily used to conduct rapid building damage assessment. Compared to optical satellite imageries, the Synthetic Aperture Radar can penetrate cloud cover and provide more complete spatial coverage of damaged zones in various weather conditions. However, these InSAR imageries often contain highly noisy and mixed signals induced by co-occurring or co-located building damage, flood, flood/wind-induced vegetation changes, as well as anthropogenic activities, making it challenging to extract accurate building damage information. In this paper, we introduced an approach for rapid post-hurricane building damage detection from InSAR imagery. This approach encoded complex causal dependencies among wind, flood, building damage, and InSAR imagery using a holistic causal Bayesian network. Based on the causal Bayesian network, we further jointly inferred the large-scale unobserved building damage by fusing the information from InSAR imagery with prior physical models of flood and wind, without the need for ground truth labels. Furthermore, we validated our estimation results in a real-world devastating hurricane -- the 2022 Hurricane Ian. We gathered and annotated building damage ground truth data in Lee County, Florida, and compared the introduced method's estimation results with the ground truth and benchmarked it against state-of-the-art models to assess the effectiveness of our proposed method. Results show that our method achieves rapid and accurate detection of building damage, with significantly reduced processing time compared to traditional manual inspection methods., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

The generation of smoother and shorter spiral complete coverage paths in multi-connected domains is a crucial research topic in path planning for robotic cavity machining and other related fields. Traditional methods for spiral path planning in multi-connected domains typically incorporate a subregion division procedure that leads to excessive subregion bridging, requiring longer, more sharply turning, and unevenly spaced spirals to achieve complete coverage. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel spiral complete coverage path planning method using conformal slit mapping. It takes advantage of the fact that conformal slit mapping can transform multi-connected domains into regular disks or annuluses without the need for subregion division. Firstly, a slit mapping calculation technique is proposed for segmented cubic spline boundaries with corners. Secondly, a spiral path spacing control method is developed based on the maximum inscribed circle radius between adjacent conformal slit mapping iso-parameters. Thirdly, the spiral coverage path is derived by offsetting iso-parameters. Numerical experiments indicate that our method shares a comparable order of magnitude in computation time with the traditional PDE-based spiral complete coverage path method, but it excels in optimizing total path length, smoothness, and spacing consistency. Finally, we performed experiments on cavity milling and dry runs to compare the new method with the traditional PDE-based method in terms of machining duration and steering impact, respectively. The comparison reveals that, with both algorithms achieving complete coverage, the new algorithm reduces machining time and steering impact by 12.34% and 22.78%, respectively, compared with the traditional PDE-based method., Comment: 47 pages, 17 figures, accepted by IJRR on April 10th

Accurate shared micromobility demand predictions are essential for transportation planning and management. Although deep learning models provide powerful tools to deal with demand prediction problems, studies on forecasting highly-accurate spatiotemporal shared micromobility demand are still lacking. This paper proposes a deep learning model named Interactive Convolutional Network (ICN) to forecast spatiotemporal travel demand for shared micromobility. The proposed model develops a novel channel dilation method by utilizing multi-dimensional spatial information (i.e., demographics, functionality, and transportation supply) based on travel behavior knowledge for building the deep learning model. We use the convolution operation to process the dilated tensor to simultaneously capture temporal and spatial dependencies. Based on a binary-tree-structured architecture and interactive convolution, the ICN model extracts features at different temporal resolutions, and then generates predictions using a fully-connected layer. The proposed model is evaluated for two real-world case studies in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. The results show that the ICN model significantly outperforms all the selected benchmark models. The model predictions can help the micromobility operators develop optimal vehicle rebalancing schemes and guide cities to better manage the shared micromobility system.

Real-time forecasting of travel demand during wildfire evacuations is crucial for emergency managers and transportation planners to make timely and better-informed decisions. However, few studies focus on accurate travel demand forecasting in large-scale emergency evacuations. Therefore, this study develops and tests a new methodological framework for modeling trip generation in wildfire evacuations by using (a) large-scale GPS data generated by mobile devices and (b) state-of-the-art AI technologies. The proposed methodology aims at forecasting evacuation trips and other types of trips. Based on the travel demand inferred from the GPS data, we develop a new deep learning model, i.e., Situational-Aware Multi-Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (SA-MGCRN), along with a model updating scheme to achieve real-time forecasting of travel demand during wildfire evacuations. The proposed methodological framework is tested in this study for a real-world case study: the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, CA. The results show that SA-MGCRN significantly outperforms all the selected state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of prediction performance. Our finding suggests that the most important model components of SA-MGCRN are evacuation order/warning information, proximity to fire, and population change, which are consistent with behavioral theories and empirical findings.

In this paper, we study block Jacobi operators on $\mathbb{Z}$ with quasi-periodic meromorphic potential. We prove the non-perturbative Anderson localization for such operators in the large coupling regime.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have been increasingly adopted for travel demand forecasting. The AI-based travel demand forecasting models, though generate accurate predictions, may produce prediction biases and raise fairness issues. Using such biased models for decision-making may lead to transportation policies that exacerbate social inequalities. However, limited studies have been focused on addressing the fairness issues of these models. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel methodology to develop fairness-aware, highly-accurate travel demand forecasting models. Particularly, the proposed methodology can enhance the fairness of AI models for multiple protected attributes (such as race and income) simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce a new fairness regularization term, which is explicitly designed to measure the correlation between prediction accuracy and multiple protected attributes, into the loss function of the travel demand forecasting model. We conduct two case studies to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology using real-world ridesourcing-trip data in Chicago, IL and Austin, TX, respectively. Results highlight that our proposed methodology can effectively enhance fairness for multiple protected attributes while preserving prediction accuracy. Additionally, we have compared our methodology with three state-of-the-art methods that adopt the regularization term approach, and the results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms them in both preserving prediction accuracy and enhancing fairness. This study can provide transportation professionals with a new tool to achieve fair and accurate travel demand forecasting., Comment: improved the methodology; updated new contents

The growing significance of ridesourcing services in recent years suggests a need to examine the key determinants of ridesourcing demand. However, little is known regarding the nonlinear effects and spatial heterogeneity of ridesourcing demand determinants. This study applies an explainable-machine-learning-based analytical framework to identify the key factors that shape ridesourcing demand and to explore their nonlinear associations across various spatial contexts (airport, downtown, and neighborhood). We use the ridesourcing-trip data in Chicago for empirical analysis. The results reveal that the importance of built environment varies across spatial contexts, and it collectively contributes the largest importance in predicting ridesourcing demand for airport trips. Additionally, the nonlinear effects of built environment on ridesourcing demand show strong spatial variations. Ridesourcing demand is usually most responsive to the built environment changes for downtown trips, followed by neighborhood trips and airport trips. These findings offer transportation professionals nuanced insights for managing ridesourcing services.

Ridesourcing is popular in many cities. Despite its theoretical benefits, a large body of studies have claimed that ridesourcing also brings (negative) externalities (e.g., inducing trips and aggravating traffic congestion). Therefore, many cities are planning to enact or have already enacted policies to regulate its use. However, these policies' effectiveness or impact on ridesourcing demand and traffic congestion is uncertain. To this end, this study applies difference-in-differences (i.e., a regression-based causal inference approach) to empirically evaluate the effects of the congestion tax policy on ridesourcing demand and traffic congestion in Chicago. It shows that this congestion tax policy significantly curtails overall ridesourcing demand but marginally alleviates traffic congestion. The results are robust to the choice of time windows and data sets, additional control variables, alternative model specifications, alternative control groups, and alternative modeling approaches (i.e., regression discontinuity in time). Moreover, considerable heterogeneity exists. For example, the policy notably reduces ridesourcing demand with short travel distances, but such an impact is gradually attenuated as the distance increases.

Accurately forecasting the real-time travel demand for dockless scooter-sharing is crucial for the planning and operations of transportation systems. Deep learning models provide researchers with powerful tools to achieve this task, but research in this area is still lacking. This paper thus proposes a novel deep learning architecture named Spatio-Temporal Multi-Graph Transformer (STMGT) to forecast the real-time spatiotemporal dockless scooter-sharing demand. The proposed model uses a graph convolutional network (GCN) based on adjacency graph, functional similarity graph, demographic similarity graph, and transportation supply similarity graph to attach spatial dependency to temporal input (i.e., historical demand). The output of GCN is subsequently processed with weather condition information by the Transformer to capture temporal dependency. Then, a convolutional layer is used to generate the final prediction. The proposed model is evaluated for two real-world case studies in Washington, D.C. and Austin, TX, respectively, and the results show that for both case studies, STMGT significantly outperforms all the selected benchmark models, and the most important model component is the weather information. The proposed model can help the micromobility operators develop optimal vehicle rebalancing schemes and guide cities to better manage dockless scooter-sharing operations., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible

Accurately forecasting ridesourcing demand is important for effective transportation planning and policy-making. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), researchers have started to utilize machine learning models to forecast travel demand, which, in many cases, can produce higher prediction accuracy than statistical models. However, most existing machine-learning studies used a global model to predict the demand and ignored the influence of spatial heterogeneity (i.e., the spatial variations in the impacts of explanatory variables). Spatial heterogeneity can drive the parameter estimations varying over space; failing to consider the spatial variations may limit the model's prediction performance. To account for spatial heterogeneity, this study proposes a Clustering-aided Ensemble Method (CEM) to forecast the zone-to-zone (census-tract-to-census-tract) travel demand for ridesourcing services. Specifically, we develop a clustering framework to split the origin-destination pairs into different clusters and ensemble the cluster-specific machine learning models for prediction. We implement and test the proposed methodology by using the ridesourcing-trip data in Chicago. The results show that, with a more transparent and flexible model structure, the CEM significantly improves the prediction accuracy than the benchmark models (i.e., global machine-learning and statistical models directly trained on all observations). This study offers transportation researchers and practitioners a new methodology of travel demand forecasting, especially for new travel modes like ridesourcing and micromobility., Comment: 31 pages, 8 tables, 3 figures