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Heeseung Bang

Publications and source records attributed to Heeseung Bang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Learning-Based Robust Bayesian Persuasion with Conformal Prediction Guarantees

Classical Bayesian persuasion assumes that senders fully understand how receivers form beliefs and make decisions--an assumption that rarely holds when receivers possess private information or exhibit non-Bayesian behavior. In this paper, we develop a learning-based framework that integrates neural networks with conformal prediction to achieve robust persuasion under uncertainty about receiver belief formation. The proposed neural architecture learns end-to-end mappings from receiver observations and sender signals to action predictions, eliminating the need to identify belief mechanisms explicitly. Conformal prediction constructs finite-sample valid prediction sets with provable marginal coverage, enabling principled, distribution-free robust optimization. We establish exact coverage guarantees for the data-generating policy and derive bounds on coverage degradation under policy shifts. Furthermore, we provide neural network approximation and estimation error bounds, with sample complexity $O(d \log(|\mathcal{U}||\mathcal{Y}||\mathcal{S}|)/\varepsilon^2)$, where $d$ denotes the effective network dimension, and finite-sample lower bounds on the sender's expected utility. Numerical experiments on smart-grid energy management illustrate the framework's robustness.

eess.SY

Off-Policy Evaluation for Sequential Persuasion Process with Unobserved Confounding

In this paper, we expand the Bayesian persuasion framework to account for unobserved confounding variables in sender-receiver interactions. While traditional models assume that belief updates follow Bayesian principles, real-world scenarios often involve hidden variables that impact the receiver's belief formation and decision-making. We conceptualize this as a sequential decision-making problem, where the sender and receiver interact over multiple rounds. In each round, the sender communicates with the receiver, who also interacts with the environment. Crucially, the receiver's belief update is affected by an unobserved confounding variable. By reformulating this scenario as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), we capture the sender's incomplete information regarding both the dynamics of the receiver's beliefs and the unobserved confounder. We prove that finding an optimal observation-based policy in this POMDP is equivalent to solving for an optimal signaling strategy in the original persuasion framework. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this reformulation facilitates the application of proximal learning for off-policy evaluation in the persuasion process. This advancement enables the sender to evaluate alternative signaling strategies using only observational data from a behavioral policy, thus eliminating the necessity for costly new experiments.

cs.AI

AI Recommendation Systems for Lane-Changing Using Adherence-Aware Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we present an adherence-aware reinforcement learning (RL) approach aimed at seeking optimal lane-changing recommendations within a semi-autonomous driving environment to enhance a single vehicle's travel efficiency. The problem is framed within a Markov decision process setting and is addressed through an adherence-aware deep Q network, which takes into account the partial compliance of human drivers with the recommended actions. This approach is evaluated within CARLA's driving environment under realistic scenarios.

cs.LG

Route Recommendations for Traffic Management Under Learned Partial Driver Compliance

In this paper, we aim to mitigate congestion in traffic management systems by guiding travelers along system-optimal (SO) routes. However, we recognize that most theoretical approaches assume perfect driver compliance, which often does not reflect reality, as drivers tend to deviate from recommendations to fulfill their personal objectives. Therefore, we propose a route recommendation framework that explicitly learns partial driver compliance and optimizes traffic flow under realistic adherence. We first compute an SO edge flow through flow optimization techniques. Next, we train a compliance model based on historical driver decisions to capture individual responses to our recommendations. Finally, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem that minimizes the gap between the target SO flow and the realized flow under conditions of imperfect adherence. Our simulations conducted on a grid network reveal that our approach significantly reduces travel time compared to baseline strategies, demonstrating the practical advantage of incorporating learned compliance into traffic management.

eess.SY

A Survey on Small-Scale Testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles and Robot Swarms

Connected and automated vehicles and robot swarms hold transformative potential for enhancing safety, efficiency, and sustainability in the transportation and manufacturing sectors. Extensive testing and validation of these technologies is crucial for their deployment in the real world. While simulations are essential for initial testing, they often have limitations in capturing the complex dynamics of real-world interactions. This limitation underscores the importance of small-scale testbeds. These testbeds provide a realistic, cost-effective, and controlled environment for testing and validating algorithms, acting as an essential intermediary between simulation and full-scale experiments. This work serves to facilitate researchers' efforts in identifying existing small-scale testbeds suitable for their experiments and provide insights for those who want to build their own. In addition, it delivers a comprehensive survey of the current landscape of these testbeds. We derive 62 characteristics of testbeds based on the well-known sense-plan-act paradigm and offer an online table comparing 23 small-scale testbeds based on these characteristics. The online table is hosted on our designated public webpage https://bassamlab.github.io/testbeds-survey, and we invite testbed creators and developers to contribute to it. We closely examine nine testbeds in this paper, demonstrating how the derived characteristics can be used to present testbeds. Furthermore, we discuss three ongoing challenges concerning small-scale testbeds that we identified, i.e., small-scale to full-scale transition, sustainability, and power and resource management.

cs.RO

On Mobility Equity and the Promise of Emerging Transportation Systems

This paper introduces a mobility equity metric (MEM) for evaluating fairness and accessibility in multi-modal intelligent transportation systems. The MEM simultaneously accounts for service accessibility and transportation costs across different modes of transportation and social demographics. We provide a data-driven validation of the proposed MEM to characterize the impact of various parameters in the metric across cities in the U.S. We subsequently develop a routing framework that aims to optimize MEM within a transportation network containing both public transit and private vehicles. Within this framework, a system planner provides routing suggestions to vehicles across all modes of transportation to maximize MEM. We evaluate our approach through numerical simulations, analyzing the impact of travel demands and compliance of private vehicles. This work provides insights into designing transportation systems that are not only efficient but also equitable, ensuring fair access to essential services across diverse populations.

eess.SY

A Mobility Equity Metric for Multi-Modal Intelligent Transportation Systems

In this paper, we introduce a metric to evaluate the equity in mobility and a routing framework to enhance the metric within multi-modal intelligent transportation systems. The mobility equity metric (MEM) simultaneously accounts for service accessibility and transportation costs to quantify the equity and fairness in a transportation network. Finally, we develop a system planner integrated with MEM that aims to distribute travel demand for the transportation network, resulting in a socially optimal mobility system. Our framework results in a transportation network that is efficient in terms of travel time, improves accessibility, and ensures equity in transportation.

eess.SY

A Study of an Atomic Mobility Game With Uncertainty Under Prospect Theory

In this paper, we present a study of a mobility game with uncertainty in the decision-making of travelers and incorporate prospect theory to model travel behavior. We formulate a mobility game that models how travelers distribute their traffic flows in a transportation network with splittable traffic, utilizing the Bureau of Public Roads function to establish the relationship between traffic flow and travel time cost. Given the inherent non-linearities and complexity introduced by the uncertainties, we propose a smooth approximation function to estimate the prospect-theoretic cost functions. As part of our analysis, we characterize the best-fit parameters and derive an upper bound for the error. We then show the existence of an equilibrium and its its best-possible approximation.

eess.SY

Safe Merging in Mixed Traffic with Confidence

In this letter, we present an approach for learning human driving behavior, without relying on specific model structures or prior distributions, in a mixed-traffic environment where connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) coexist with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). We employ conformal prediction to obtain theoretical safety guarantees and use real-world traffic data to validate our approach. Then, we design a controller that ensures effective merging of CAVs with HDVs with safety guarantees. We provide numerical simulations to illustrate the efficacy of the control approach.

eess.SY

A Framework for Effective AI Recommendations in Cyber-Physical-Human Systems

Many cyber-physical-human systems (CPHS) involve a human decision-maker who may receive recommendations from an artificial intelligence (AI) platform while holding the ultimate responsibility of making decisions. In such CPHS applications, the human decision-maker may depart from an optimal recommended decision and instead implement a different one for various reasons. In this letter, we develop a rigorous framework to overcome this challenge. In our framework, we consider that humans may deviate from AI recommendations as they perceive and interpret the system's state in a different way than the AI platform. We establish the structural properties of optimal recommendation strategies and develop an approximate human model (AHM) used by the AI. We provide theoretical bounds on the optimality gap that arises from an AHM and illustrate the efficacy of our results in a numerical example.

eess.SY

Optimal trajectory planning meets network-level routing: Integrated control framework for emerging mobility systems

In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical decision-making framework for emerging mobility systems. Despite numerous studies focusing on optimizing vehicle flow, practical feasibility has often been overlooked. To address this gap, we present a route-recovery method and energy-optimal trajectory planning tailored for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to ensure the realization of optimal flow. Our approach identifies the optimal vehicle flow to minimize total travel time while considering consistent mobility demands in urban settings. We deploy a heuristic route-recovery algorithm that assigns routes to CAVs and departure/arrival time at each road segment. Furthermore, we propose an efficient coordination method that rapidly solves constrained optimization problems by flexibly piecing together unconstrained energy-optimal trajectories. The proposed method has the potential to effectively generate optimal vehicle flow, contributing to the reduction of travel time and energy consumption in urban areas.

eess.SY

A Hierarchical Approach to Optimal Flow-Based Routing and Coordination of Connected and Automated Vehicles

This paper addresses the challenge of generating optimal vehicle flow at the macroscopic level. Although several studies have focused on optimizing vehicle flow, little attention has been given to ensuring it can be practically achieved. To overcome this issue, we propose a route-recovery and eco-driving strategy for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) that guarantees optimal flow generation. Our approach involves identifying the optimal vehicle flow that minimizes total travel time, given the constant travel demands in urban areas. We then develop a heuristic route-recovery algorithm to assign routes to CAVs. Finally, we present an efficient coordination framework to minimize the energy consumption of CAVs while safely crossing intersections. The proposed method can effectively generate optimal vehicle flow and potentially reduce travel time and energy consumption in urban areas.

math.OC

Routing in Mixed Transportation Systems for Mobility Equity

This letter proposes a routing framework in mixed transportation systems for improving mobility equity. We present a strategic routing game that governs interactions between compliant and noncompliant vehicles, where noncompliant vehicles are modeled with cognitive hierarchy theory. Then, we introduce a mobility equity metric (MEM) to quantify the accessibility and fairness in the transportation network. We integrate the MEM into the routing framework to optimize it with adjustable weights for different transportation modes. The proposed approach bridges the gap between technological advancements and societal goals in mixed transportation systems to enhance efficiency and equity. We provide numerical examples and analysis of the results.

eess.SY

Re-Routing Strategy of Connected and Automated Vehicles Considering Coordination at Intersections

In this paper, we propose a re-routing strategy for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), considering coordination and control of all the CAVs in the network. The objective for each CAV is to find the route that minimizes the total travel time of all CAVs. We coordinate CAVs at signal-free intersections to accurately predict the travel time for the routing problem. While it is possible to find a system-optimal solution by comparing all the possible combinations of the routes, this may impose a computational burden. Thus, we instead find a person-by-person optimal solution to reduce computational time while still deriving a better solution than selfish routing. We validate our framework through simulations in a grid network.

eess.SY

A Digital Smart City for Emerging Mobility Systems

The increasing demand for emerging mobility systems with connected and automated vehicles has imposed the necessity for quality testing environments to support their development. In this paper, we introduce a Unity-based virtual simulation environment for emerging mobility systems, called the Information and Decision Science Lab's Scaled Smart Digital City (IDS 3D City), intended to operate alongside its physical peer and its established control framework. By utilizing the Robot Operation System, AirSim, and Unity, we constructed a simulation environment capable of iteratively designing experiments significantly faster than it is possible in a physical testbed. This environment provides an intermediate step to validate the effectiveness of our control algorithms prior to their implementation in the physical testbed. The IDS 3D City also enables us to demonstrate that our control algorithms work independently of the underlying vehicle dynamics, as the vehicle dynamics introduced by AirSim operate at a different scale than our scaled smart city. Finally, we demonstrate the behavior of our digital environment by performing an experiment in both the virtual and physical environments and comparing their outputs.

cs.RO

Combined Optimal Routing and Coordination of Connected and Automated Vehicles

In this letter, we consider a transportation network with a 100\% penetration rate of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and present an optimal routing approach that takes into account the efficiency achieved in the network by coordinating the CAVs at specific traffic scenarios, e.g., intersections, merging roadways, and roundabouts. To derive the optimal route of a travel request, we use the information of the CAVs that have already received a routing solution. This enables each CAV to consider the traffic conditions on the roads. The solution of any new travel request determines the optimal travel time at each traffic scenario while satisfying all state, control, and safety constraints. We validate the performance of our framework through numerical simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to consider the coordination of CAVs in a routing problem.

eess.SY

A Research and Educational Robotic Testbed for Real-time Control of Emerging Mobility Systems: From Theory to Scaled Experiments

Emerging mobility systems, e.g., connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), shared mobility, and electric vehicles, provide the most intriguing opportunity for enabling users to better monitor transportation network conditions and make better decisions for improving safety and transportation efficiency. However, before connectivity and automation are deployed en masse, a thorough evaluation of CAVs is required-ranging from numerical simulation to real-world public roads. Assessment of the performance of CAVs in scaled testbeds has recently gained momentum due to the flexibility they offer to conduct quick, repeatable experiments that could go one step beyond simulation. This article introduces the Information and Decision Science Lab's Scaled Smart City (IDS$^3$C), a 1:25 research and educational scaled robotic testbed that is capable of replicating different real-world urban traffic scenarios. IDS$^3$C was designed to investigate the effect of emerging mobility systems on safety and transportation efficiency. On the educational front, IDS$^3$C can be used for (a) training and educating graduate students by exposing them to a balanced mix of theory and practice, (b) integrating the research outcomes into existing courses, (c) involving undergraduate students in research, (d) creating interactive educational demos, and (e) reaching out to high-school students. In our exposition, we also present a real-time control framework that can be used to coordinate CAVs at traffic scenarios such as crossing signal-free intersections, merging at roadways and roundabouts, cruising in congested traffic, passing through speed reduction zones, and lane-merging or passing maneuvers. Finally, we provide a tutorial for applying our framework in coordinating robotic CAVs to a multi-lane roundabout scenario and a transportation corridor in IDS$^3$C.

math.OC

Congestion-Aware Routing, Rebalancing, and Charging Scheduling for Electric Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand System

In this paper, we investigate the problem of routing, rebalancing, and charging for electric autonomous mobility-on-demand systems concerning traffic congestion. We analyze the problem at the macroscopical level and use a volume-delay function to capture traffic congestion. To address this problem, we first formulate an optimization problem for routing and rebalancing. Then, we present heuristic algorithms to find the loop of the traffic flow and examine the energy constraints within the resulting loop. We impose charging constraints on the re-routing problem so that the new solution satisfies the energy constraint. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our method through simulation.

math.OC