Sustainable mobility and smart mobility management play important roles in achieving smart cities’ goals. In this context we investigate the role of smartphones as mobility behavior sensors and evaluate the responsivity of different attitudinal profiles towards personalized route suggestion incentives delivered via mobile phones. The empirical results are based on mobile sensed data collected from more than 3400 people’s real life over a period of six months. The findings show which user profiles are most likely to accept such incentives and how likely they are to result in more sustainable mode choices. In addition we provide insights into tendencies towards accepting more sustainable route options for different trip purposes and illustrate smart city platform potential (for collection of mobility behavior data and delivery of incentives) as a tool for development of personalized mobility management campaigns and policies.

Common goals of sustainable mobility approaches are to reduce the need for travel, to facilitate modal shifts, to decrease trip distances and to improve energy efficiency in the transportation systems. Among these issues, modal shift plays an important role for the adoption of vehicles with fewer or zero emissions. Nowadays, the electric bike (e-bike) is becoming a valid alternative to cars in urban areas. However, to promote modal shift, a better understanding of the mobility behaviour of e-bike users is required. In this paper, we investigate the mobility habits of e-bikers using GPS data collected in Belgium from 2014 to 2015. By analysing more than 10,000 trips, we provide insights about e-bike trip features such as: distance, duration and speed. In addition, we offer a deep look into which routes are preferred by bike owners in terms of their physical characteristics and how weather influences e-bike usage. Results show that trips with higher travel distances are performed during working days and are correlated with higher average speeds. Usage patterns extracted from our data set also indicate that e-bikes are preferred for commuting (home-work) and business (work related) trips rather than for recreational trips.

The article describes an application of global positioning system (GPS) tracking data (floating bike data) for measuring delays for cyclists at signalized intersections. For selected intersections, we used trip data collected by smartphone tracking to calculate the average delay for cyclists by interpolation between GPS locations before and after the intersection. The outcomes were proven to be stable for different strategies in selecting the GPS locations used for calculation, although GPS locations too close to the intersection tended to lead to an underestimation of the delay. Therefore, the sample frequency of the GPS tracking data is an important parameter to ensure that suitable GPS locations are available before and after the intersection. The calculated delays are realistic values, compared to the theoretically expected values, which are often applied because of the lack of observed data. For some of the analyzed intersections, however, the calculated delays lay outside of the expected range, possibly because the statistics assumed a random arrival rate of cyclists. This condition may not be met when, for example, bicycles arrive in platoons because of an upstream intersection. This justifies that GPS-based delays can form a valuable addition to the theoretically expected values.

The use of smartphone tracking is seen as the way forward in data collection for travel behavior studies. It overcomes some of the weaknesses of the classical approach (which uses paper trip diaries) in terms of accuracy and user annoyance. This article evaluates if these benefits hold in the practical application of smartphone tracking and compares the findings of a travel behavior survey using smartphone tracking to the findings of a previous paper survey. We compare three phases of the travel behavior study. In the recruitment phase, we expect smartphone tracking to make people more willing to participate in surveys, given the innovative nature and reduced burden to participants. However, we found the recruitment of participants equally challenging as for classical methods. In the data collection phase, however, we observe that participants entering the smartphone tracking survey are much more likely to complete the data collection period than when using paper trip diaries. Because of the limited burden, the risk of drop-out from the survey is significantly lower, making the actual data collection more efficient, even for longer survey periods. Finally, in the data analysis phase, the travel behavior indicators derived from smartphone tracking data result in higher average trip rates, shorter average trip lengths and a higher share of active modes (bike, walking) than the results from the paper survey. Although this is explained by more complete and more consistent trip registration, this finding is problematic for comparability between surveys based on different methods, both for longitudinal monitoring (comparability over consequent surveys) and for benchmarking (comparability over geographical areas). Therefore, it is crucial to clearly report the applied data collection methods when describing or comparing travel indicators. In surveys, a combined approach of both written trip diaries and smartphone tracking is advised, where each method can complement the shortcomings of the other.

Human travel behaviour has been addressed in many transport studies, where travel survey methods have been widely used to collect self-reported insights of daily mobility patterns. However, since the introduction of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and more recently smartphones with built-in GNSS, researchers have adopted these ubiquitous devices as tools for collecting mobility behaviour data. Although most studies recognize the applicability of this technology, it still has limitations. These are rarely addressed in a quantified manner. Often the quality of the collected data tends to be overestimated and these errors propagate into the aggregated results providing incomplete knowledge of the levels of confidence of the results and conclusions. In this study, we focus on the completeness aspects of data quality using GNSS data from four campaigns in the Flanders region of Belgium. The empirical results are based on mobility behaviour data collected through smartphones and include more than 450 participants over a period of twenty-nine months. Our findings show which transport mode is affected the most and how land use affects the quality of the collected data. In addition, we provide insights into the time to first fix that can be used for a better estimation of travel patterns.

Manufacturing industry faces increasing complexity in the performance of assembly tasks due to escalating demand for complex products with a greater number of variations. Operators require robust assistance systems to enhance productivity, efficiency, and safety. However, existing support services often fall short when operators encounter unstructured open questions and incomplete sentences due to primarily relying on procedural digital work instructions. This draws attention to the need for practical application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques. This study addresses these challenges by introducing a domain-specific dataset tailored to assembly tasks, capturing unique language patterns and linguistic characteristics. We explore strategies to process declarative and imperative sentences, including incomplete ones, effectively. Thorough evaluation of three pre-trained NLP libraries—NLTK, SPACY, and Stanford—is performed to assess their effectiveness in handling assembly-related concepts and ability to address the domain’s distinctive challenges. Our findings demonstrate the efficient performance of these open-source NLP libraries in accurately handling assembly-related concepts. By providing valuable insights, our research contributes to developing intelligent operator assistance systems, bridging the gap between NLP techniques and the assembly domain within manufacturing industry.