Zafeiris Kokkinogenis

Playing Transportation Seriously: Applications of Serious Games to Artificial Transportation Systems

A discussion of the potential integration of serious games into the conceptual framework of artificial transportation systems focuses on behavior elicitation through peer-designed agents to model and simulate artificial societies on a participative basis.

A HLA-based multi-resolution approach to simulating electric vehicles in simulink and SUMO

Traffic congestion affects not only the economic activity of cities but is also responsible for air quality and global warming problems. The employment of electric buses in metropolitan transportation as an alternative to internal combustion engine buses appears to be a promising eco-sustainable solution. However, an important aspect in evaluating the performance and adequateness of such vehicles is the fact they are immersed in an urban context. This work follows a HLA-based distributed architecture for electric bus powertrain simulation within a realistic urban mobility environment. In that sense, it discusses on coupling the SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) microscopic traffic simulator with a model of an electric bus powertrain subsystem designed in the MatLab/Simulink environment. Both the electric bus traction subsystems and the integration have been validated using field test experimental data. The proposed simulation framework is multi-faceted. As a matter of fact it can be used, not only as electric vehicle evaluation tool under different dynamics of traffic conditions and driving behavior, but also as a planner for charging strategies and optimizations.

Mobility Network Evaluation in the User Perspective: Real-Time Sensing of Traffic Information in Twitter Messages

We discuss a new type of mobility study focusing on subjective user opinions of mobility networks. Taking advantage of the growth in popularity of opinion mining in social media, and social media itself, we present the architecture of a system capable of automatically capturing user perspective toward a mobility network, based on web user-generated content. We discuss the value of acquiring this subjective information, especially for urban planners, and its contribution to an overall understanding of human mobility. We look at users as sensors of mobility dynamics, capable of providing an insight into the flaws of mobility networks. To achieve this, this chapter presents an initial attempt to use microblogging messages posted on Twitter (by users in transit) to perform real-time sensing of traffic-related information. We propose a text classification approach to the problem: we wish to automatically identify traffic-related messages posted on Twitter, among the millions of unrelated messages posted by users.

A platform for the design, simulation and development of quadcopter multi-agent systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining the attention of researchers around the world. Recently researchers apply the multi-agent paradigm to such domain taking advantage of its research in cognition, deliberation, and mainly coordination mechanisms. The aim of our research is to contribute to the multiple quadcopter simulation area introducing a platform for the design, simulation, and development of quadcopter MultiAgent Systems (MAS). Specifically for this paper, we minutely discuss the proposed architecture and present the implemented prototype focusing our experiments on the scalability and the resource usage of it. The results demonstrate that the centralised perspective limits the scalability mainly when the physical engine is being used; also, we identify that the method responsible for the 3D update is the platforms bottleneck. After this work different type of studies in social interaction of quadcopters will follow up as well as the improvement of the proposed architecture, for instance, using a multi-threading approach.

Sensing Bluetooth Mobility Data: Potentials and Applications

Information related to mobility dynamics constitutes an important factor to be considered in traffic management to improve the efficiency of existing systems. We present a proof-of-concept deployment of sensors using the Bluetooth technology to detect traffic flow conditions. Besides traditional method consisting of a network of stationary sensors, we present a novel approach that uses sensors deployed in moving vehicles that allows new type studies and captures new insights of mobility. Both approaches complement the most common methods of traffic sensing while being more cost-effective and easily available. Early experimental results show the variety of information available through both approaches spanning from Origin/Destination matrices and travel times to insights into emerging mobile neighborhoods. These metrics are important to improve traffic management increasing the efficiency of urban mobility networks.

A symbiotic simulation platform for agent-based quadcopters

Small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining the attention of researchers around the world, due to their versatility and performance in both indoor and outdoor applications. The whole project aims to specify and implement a symbiotic simulation platform to assist the design, development and testing of UAVs that use a quad-rotor configuration. Additionally, in this paper we firstly discuss the integration of two software components to build the simulation environment: Jason, an agent-oriented platform for the development and simulation of multi-agent systems and the jME3 game engine, used for 3-dimensional simulations of the models. Further, we describe the implementation of the physical multi-rotor system and present some preliminary results, as well as the description of the symbiotic simulation platform.

Driver Attitude and Its Influence on the Energy Waste of Electric Buses

The objective of this paper is to analyze the influence of different driver behaviors on the energy consumption of electric buses. It shows that risk-taking attitudes on traffic are not only dangerous to the driver, to the bus users and to the surroundings, but also promotes a poorer performance of the vehicle itself, increasing its energy consumption and reducing the amount of energy that can be recovered on regenerative braking.

An exploratory study of taxi sharing schemas

Taxi sharing services have been increasing in the past few years in several countries. In this paper we propose a solution to taxi sharing problem based on Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with Temporal Restriction. We approach the problem in a static way, for testing purposes. Two metaheuristics were used to determine the best travel plans for taxi sharing service, taking into account the pickup and delivery time of each passenger. Tabu Search (TS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) were used to solve the problem, as literature review suggested, presenting good results. Four test scenario were used with 10, 20, 30 and 40 passengers, knowing their starting location. Analysis of solutions found by TS and SA are compared to the average cost to conclude which is the best travel plan to be used by taxi sharing service.

A systematic review protocol on shared transportation

Recently, many studies in the literature have been intensified in the scope of mobility services, presenting new technological solutions that can minimize problems, such as traffic congestion and the emission of greenhouse gases resulting from the population growth in large cities. Some services, namely shared services, are mainly dedicated to trying to encourage people to use transport that can be shared. In this paper, we propose a systematic literature review protocol oriented to shared transportation, so as to support bibliographical reviews by researchers on this domain. From the proposed systematic review methodology, we present preliminary results of a survey conducted on shared services.

An Agent-based Approach to Schedule Crane Operations in Rail-Rail Transshipment Terminals

Rail-rail transshipment terminals (RRTT) play the hub role in hub-and-spoke rail networks. In this type of terminals, containers are transshipped among freight trains by gantry cranes. This study aims at scheduling crane operations with an agent-based simulation approach to minimize the total transshipment time. The decisions to make include: the positions of containers on outbound trains; the assignment of container moves to cranes, as overlapping areas for the cranes’ operation are considered; the sequence of transshipments. The contribution of this paper is an agent-based approach to the crane operations scheduling problem in a RRTT framework. This approach is validated on a set of instances taken from the literature and the results compared against a variable neighbourhood descent algorithm.