Urban Mobility Analytics: Using Data from Opportunistic Sensors to Improve Decisions

Haris N. Koutsopoulos

MIT and KTH, Royal Institue of Technology

Thursday, April 24, 2014

12pm-1pm

168 Snell Engineering Center

Abstract

The extensive deployment of Information and Communication Technologies allows the collection of large amounts of transportation and mobility related data.  GPS, smart phones, and smart cards (e.g. Charlie Card) are examples of opportunistic sensors that provide extensive disaggregate data on the movement of people, goods, and vehicles on the urban network at a relatively low cost. This detailed urban traffic and transit activity data has the potential to advance the basic understanding of the behavior of urban transportation systems and enable applications such as real time operations monitoring, transport supply and demand management for sustainability, planning and policy analysis. The talk explores these developments in the context of two urban transportation systems: traffic networks and transit systems.  We present challenges in processing such data and discuss methods and building blocks for extracting useful information for operations planning and control, communication and information on demand services, and other applications. On the traffic side we discuss work related to the iMobility Lab, an urban laboratory with real time data from taxis in Stockholm, and on the transit side we explore the use of smart card data to infer the movement of passengers in the system and characterize their travel patterns.

Bio

Haris N. Koutsopoulos is a (Guest) Professor of Transport Science at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and a research associate in the Transit Research Program at MIT. He was Director of the Transport Platform at KTH, a university-wide body to develop strategic directions, coordinate related activities, and promote multidisciplinary research opportunities.  He also served as Head of the Traffic and Logistics Division. He received his Sc.Eng. from the National Technical University of Athens, and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Transportation Systems from MIT.  His research focuses on modeling Intelligent Transportation Systems, dynamic traffic assignment methods, traffic and transit simulation at various levels of resolution, driving behavior, and model calibration. His current research investigates the use of data from opportunistic sensors for monitoring and control of traffic and transit systems, understanding travel behavior, and provision of real time information.  He established the iMobility laboratory at KTH (a computational infrastructure for the processing of real time FCD and other data and their use for traffic monitoring and management, multimodal travel planning, and a platform for concept development and education). He has published extensively in these areas and received a number of awards (including the IBM Smarter Planet Award).