The modeling of walking behavior and design of walk-friendly urban pathways have been of interest to many researchers over the past decades. One of the major issues in pedestrian modeling is path planning decision-making in a dynamic walking environment with different pedestrian flows. While previous studies have agreed that pedestrian flow influences path planning, only a few studies have dealt with the empirical data to show the relationship between pedestrian flow and path planning behavior. This study introduces a new methodology for analyzing pedestrian trajectory data to find the dynamic walking conditions that influence the path planning decision. The comparison of the pedestrians’ path shows that the higher proportion of opposite flows are, the greater they influence the path selection decision. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the opposite flow changes and path planning behavior and find the spatial and temporal ranges of the opposite flow that affects the path planning behavior. Lastly, we find the ratio of pedestrians that update their paths with respect to the opposite flow rate.

There have been enormous efforts to implement automated vehicle-based mobility (AVM) by considering smart infrastructure such as cooperative intelligent transportation system. However, there is lack of consideration on economical approach for an optimal deployment strategy of the AVM service and smart infrastructure. Furthermore, the influence of travel demand in service area has been ignored. We develop a new framework for maximizing the profit of connected and automated vehicle-based mobility (CAV-M) service using cost modeling and metaheuristic optimization algorithm. The proposed framework extracts an optimal sub-network, which is selected by a set of optimal links in the service area, and identifies an optimal construction strategy for the smart infrastructure depending on given operational design domain and travel demand. Based on service network analyses with varying demand patterns and volumes, we observe that the optimal sub-network varies with the combination of trip demand patterns and volumes. It is also found that the benefit of deploying the smart infrastructure is obtainable only when there are sufficient travel demands. Furthermore, the optimal sub-network is always superior to raw network in terms of economical profit, which suggests the proposed framework has great potential to prioritize road links in the target area for the CAV-M service.

This paper proposes a novel hierarchical deep reinforcement learning-based path tracking algorithm for unmanned vehicle navigation. To achieve effective acceleration and steering control, our approach divides the multi-variable control task into distinct sub-tasks handled at different levels, enabling more efficient learning and improved policy optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves superior tracking accuracy compared to existing methods. Moreover, training models on complex reference paths allows the proposed algorithm to generalize effectively, maintaining high performance across diverse, untrained driving environments. These findings reveal the robustness and adaptability of the proposed algorithm, demonstrating the potential for application in diverse autonomous driving scenarios.

The massive amount of data related to spatiotemporal mobility offers new opportunities to understand human mobility with applications in various sectors, including transportation, logistics, and safety. However, the increase in the volume and in the dimension of mobility data makes it challenging to retrieve important information and critical features of spatiotemporal mobility. This paper develops a method to estimate probabilistic occurrences of travel demands considering interactions between origin, destination, and departure time. First, we reveal the important features in the complex structure of mobility data and identify mobility patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven model, accounting for mobility patterns, to estimate and predict travel demands. We quantify the accuracy of the proposed method for a case study using both New York city yellow taxi trip data and for-hire vehicles trip data over the entire city. Results show the accuracy of the proposed method compared to existing approaches.

There has been considerable interest in recent years regarding how a small fraction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) can mitigate traffic congestion. However, the reality of vehicle-based congestion mitigation remains elusive, due to challenges of cost, technology maturity, and regulation. As a result, recent works have investigated the necessity of autonomy by exploring driving advisory systems. Such early works have made simplifying assumptions such as perfect driver compliance. This work relaxes this assumption, focusing on compliance errors caused by physical limitations of human drivers, in particular, response delay and speed deviation. These compliance errors introduce significant unpredictability into traffic systems, complicating the design of real-time driving advisories aimed at stabilizing traffic flow. Our analysis reveals that performance degradation increases sharply under compliance errors, highlighting the associated difficulties. To address this challenge, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on an action-persistent Markov decision process (MDP) combined with domain randomization, designed for robust coarse-grained driving policies. This approach allows driving policies to effectively manage the cumulative impacts of compliance errors by generating various scenarios and corresponding traffic conditions during training. We show that in comparison to prior RL-based work which did not consider compliance errors, our policies achieve up to 2.2 times improvement in average speed over non-robust training. In addition, analytical results validate the experiment results, highlighting the benefits of the proposed framework. Overall, this paper advocates the necessity of incorporating human driver compliance errors in the development of RL-based advisory systems, achieving more effective and resilient traffic management solutions.