Mining spatiotemporal patterns of urban dwellers from taxi trajectory data

With the widespread adoption of location- aware technology, obtaining long-sequence, massive and high-accuracy spatiotemporal trajectory data of individuals has become increasingly popular in various geographic studies. Trajectory data of taxis, one of the most widely used inner-city travel modes, contain rich information about both road network traffic and travel behavior of passengers. Such data can be used to study the microscopic activity patterns of individuals as well as the macro system of urban spatial structures. This paper focuses on trajectories obtained from GPS-enabled taxis and their applications for mining urban commuting patterns. A novel approach is proposed to discover spatiotemporal patterns of household travel from the taxi trajectory dataset with a large number of point locations. The approach involves three critical steps： spatial clustering of taxi origin-destination （OD） based on urban traffic grids to discover potentially meaningful places, identifying thresh- old values from statistics of the OD clusters to extract urban jobs-housing structures, and visualization of analytic results to understand the spatial distribution and temporal trends of the revealed urban structures and implied household commuting behavior. A case study with a taxi trajectory dataset in Shanghai, China is presented to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed method.

APFD:an effective approach to taxi route recommendation with mobile trajectory big data

With the rapid development of data-driven intelligent transportation systems,an efficient route recommendation method for taxis has become a hot topic in smart cities.We present an effective taxi route recommendation approach(called APFD)based on the artificial potential field(APF)method and Dijkstra method with mobile trajectory big data.Specifically,to improve the efficiency of route recommendation,we propose a region extraction method that searches for a region including the optimal route through the origin and destination coordinates.Then,based on the APF method,we put forward an effective approach for removing redundant nodes.Finally,we employ the Dijkstra method to determine the optimal route recommendation.In particular,the APFD approach is applied to a simulation map and the real-world road network on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing.On the map,we randomly select 20 pairs of origin and destination coordinates and use APFD with the ant colony(AC)algorithm,greedy algorithm(A*),APF,rapid-exploration random tree(RRT),non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II(NSGA-II),particle swarm optimization(PSO),and Dijkstra for the shortest route recommendation.Compared with AC,A*,APF,RRT,NSGA-II,and PSO,concerning shortest route planning,APFD improves route planning capability by 1.45%–39.56%,4.64%–54.75%,8.59%–37.25%,5.06%–45.34%,0.94%–20.40%,and 2.43%–38.31%,respectively.Compared with Dijkstra,the performance of APFD is improved by 1.03–27.75 times in terms of the execution efficiency.In addition,in the real-world road network,on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing,the ability of APFD to recommend the shortest route is better than those of AC,A*,APF,RRT,NSGA-II,and PSO,and the execution efficiency of APFD is higher than that of the Dijkstra method.

Analysing taxi customer-search behaviour using Copula-based joint model

The drivers of vacant taxis tend to cruise the road network searching new passengers,which leads to additional traffic congestion,air pollution and other problems.This study introduces a Copula-based joint model to analyse destination selection and route choice behaviour in the customer-search process.A multinomial logit model is used to analyse the destination selection behaviour,and a path size logit model is used to explore the routes choice behaviour.Accordingly,the joint model applied Copula function is then established to analyse the correlation between these two behaviours.The destination customer generation rate,destination distance,route customer generation rate,path travel time,cumulative intersection delay,path size and route length are selected as explanatory variables.The taxis trajectory data were collected by global positioning system in Xidan District of Beijing City from September 2014 to February 2015.Using the log-likelihood,Bayesian information criterion as evaluation indexes to measure the fitting result,the joint model applied Copula function has the highest goodness-of-fit.The effect of explanatory variables on customer search behaviour is discussed based on the parameter estimation results.The results of this study are helpful to understand the customer-search behaviour of taxi drivers to reduce operating costs and improve the efficiency of the taxi operation system.

Estimating hotspots using a Gaussian mixture model from large-scale taxi GPS trace data

The data collected from taxi vehicles using the global positioning system(GPS)traces provides abundant temporal-spatial information,as well as information on the activity of drivers.Using taxi vehicles as mobile sensors in road networks to collect traffic information is an important emerging approach in efforts to relieve congestion.In this paper,we present a hybrid model for estimating driving paths using a density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise(DBSCAN)algorithm and a Gaussian mixture model(GMM).The first step in our approach is to extract the locations from pick-up and drop-off records(PDR)in taxi GPS equipment.Second,the locations are classified into different clusters using DBSCAN.Two parameters(density threshold and radius)are optimized using real trace data recorded from 1100 drivers.A GMM is also utilized to estimate a significant number of locations;the parameters of the GMM are optimized using an expectation-maximum(EM)likelihood algorithm.Finally,applications are used to test the effectiveness of the proposed model.In these applications,locations distributed in two regions(a residential district and a railway station)are clustered and estimated automatically.