Autonomous vehicles: challenges, opportunities, and future implications for transportation policies

This study investigates the challenges and opportunities pertaining to transportation policies that may arise as a result of emerging autonomous vehicle （AV） technologies. AV technologies can decrease the transportation cost and increase accessibility to low-income households and persons with mobility issues. This emerging technology also has far-reaching applications and implications beyond all current expectations. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and explores a broad spectrum of issues from safety to machine ethics. An indispensable part of a prospective AV development is communication over cars and infrastructure （connected vehicles）. A major knowledge gap exists in AV technology with respect to routing behaviors. Connected- vehicle technology provides a great opportunity to imple- ment an efficient and intelligent routing system. To this end, we propose a conceptual navigation model based on a fleet of AVs that are centrally dispatched over a network seeking system optimization literature on two fronts： （i） This study contributes to the it attempts to shed light on future opportunities as well as possible hurdles associated with AV technology; and （ii） it conceptualizes a navigation model for the AV which leads to highly efficient traffic circulations.

A multi-user decision support system for online city bus tour planning

Tourism is rapidly becoming a sustainable pathway toward economic prosperity for host countries and communities. Recent advances in information and communications technology, the smartphone, the Internet and Wi-Fi have given a boost to the tourism industry. The city bus tour （CBT） service is one of the most successful businesses in the tourism industry. However, there exists no smart decision support system determining the most efficient way to plan the itinerary of a CBT. In this research, we report on the ongoing development of a mobile application （app） and a website for tourists, hoteliers and travel agents to connect with city bus operators and book/purchase the best CBT both in terms of cost and time. Firstly, the CBT problem is formulated as an asymmetric sequential three-stage arc routing problem. All places of interest （PoI） and pickup/dropout points are identified with arcs of the network （instead of nodes）, each of which can be visited at least once （instead of exactly once）. Secondly, the resulting pure integer programming （IP） problem is solved using a leading optimization soft- ware known as General Algebraic Modeling System （GAMS）. The GAMS code developed for this project returns： （1） the exact optimal solution identifying the footprints of the city bus relative to all the arcs forming the minimal cost network; （2） the augmenting paths corre- sponding to the pickup stage, the PoI visiting stage and the drop-off stage. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the mobile app/website via a pilot study in the city of Melbourne （Australia）. All the computations relative to the initial tests show that the ability of the app to answer users＇ inquiries in a fraction of a minute.

An Optimized Deep Learning Approach for Improving Airline Services

The aviation industry is one of the most competitive markets. Themost common approach for airline service providers is to improve passengersatisfaction. Passenger satisfaction in the aviation industry occurs whenpassengers’ expectations are met during flights. Airline service quality iscritical in attracting new passengers and retaining existing ones. It is crucialto identify passengers’ pain points and enhance their satisfaction with theservices offered. The airlines used a variety of techniques to improve servicequality. They used data analysis approaches to analyze the passenger pointdata. These solutions have focused simply on surveys;consequently, deeplearningapproaches have received insufficient attention. In this study, deepneural networks with the adaptive moment estimation Adam optimizationalgorithm were applied to enhance classification performance. In previousstudies, the quality of the dataset has been ignored. The proposed approachwas applied to the airline passenger satisfaction dataset from the Kagglerepository. It was validated by applying artificial neural networks (ANNs),random forests, and support vector machine techniques to the same dataset. Itwas compared with other research papers that used the same dataset and had asimilar problem. The experimental results showed that the proposed approachoutperformed previous studies. It has achieved an accuracy of 99.3%.

Towards an Egyptian Mobile Banking Era

Banks have moved towards technology-based customer services such as mobile banking （m-banking）; as an alternative to traditional inter-personal services. However, M-banking still faces resistance that may hamper customers＇ adoption in Egypt. Following a mixed method approach, this study involves two main phases. First, a quantitative Consumer survey is conducted in the form of 350 structured questionnaires to identify the main barriers towards m-banking. Then, decision makers in 5 different public and private banks are interviewed in order to find similarities and difference, and identify service providers＇ roles regarding these barricrs. Questionnaire data was statistically analysed using independent T-Test, Chi-squares, frequencies and cross tabulations, while interview data was interpretively analysed. Results enabled the researchers to identify the risk, usage, and tradition as the most m-banking barriers that discourage m-banking adoption in Egypt as seen by the two main players.