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Satish V. Ukkusuri

Publications and source records attributed to Satish V. Ukkusuri.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Observation-Aligned Two-Stage Domain Decomposition for Physics-Informed Traffic State Estimation with Sparse Fixed Sensors

Traffic state estimation from sparse fixed sensors is challenging because physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) tend to over-smooth sharp transitions admitted by the Lighthill-Whitham--Richards (LWR) model. This study proposes Two-Stage Domain Decomposition Physics-Informed Neural Networks (TSDD-PINN), an observation-aligned framework for LWR-based offline speed-field reconstruction. The framework supports spatial, temporal, and space--time refinement. Matched direction analysis shows that spatial refinement has the lowest mean error and less than half the training time of space--time refinement in the tested setting, while temporal refinement is faster. A global parent PINN is first trained. In the controlled spatial implementation, its residual profile guides a deterministic partition for warm-started child networks. An optional operational safeguard retains Stage~1 when the prespecified screen does not activate. The primary I-24 MOTION evaluation spans five days, five sensor configurations, and ten seeds per configuration, yielding 1{,}500 runs. Controlled TSDD-PINN attains the lowest relative $L_2$ error in 18 of 25 configurations and 14 of 15 sparse-sensing cases, while training 2.4 times faster than the extended PINN (XPINN) baseline under the evaluated implementations and training budgets. Non-neural comparisons show that the advantage over interpolation is concentrated under sparse sensing, whereas dense sensing often favors interpolation. A separate 250-run operational evaluation finds infrequent activation and motivates the Stage-1-preserving safeguard. The residual is treated as an indicator of model difficulty rather than a validated shock detector. The evidence supports a sensing-density-dependent operating range rather than uniform improvement.

cs.LG↗

Day-to-Day Traffic Network Modeling under Route-Guidance Misinformation: Endogenous Trust and Resilience in CAV Environments

Connected and autonomous vehicles and smart mobility services increasingly use digital route guidance as an operational input to traffic network management. When this information becomes unreliable or adversarial, day-to-day traffic models must represent not only flow adaptation but also the evolution of user trust in the information source. This paper develops a coupled day-to-day traffic assignment and trust-evolution framework for route-guidance misinformation. Within-day congestion is represented by Lighthill-Whitham-Richards network loading, while day-to-day route choice follows bounded-rationality logit learning with trust-dependent reliance on external guidance. Trust is modeled as an aggregate class-level behavioral reliance state encoded by a Beta evidence model and updated from repeated guidance errors. Theoretical analysis establishes stationary equilibria, a conservative stability guide, a weighted compliance index for population-level vulnerability, and an asymmetric recovery law that explains post-attack trust hysteresis. Numerical experiments on Sioux Falls, with an Anaheim robustness check, show that endogenous trust creates a threshold-based resilience mechanism. Below the trust-activation threshold, the attack remains behaviorally stealthy and dynamic trust provides almost no attenuation. Above the threshold, trust erosion reduces the impact of the fixed-trust attack by about 91 percent in Sioux Falls and 85 percent in Anaheim. The experiments also show that CAV penetration increases fixed-trust vulnerability while preserving dynamic attenuation, and that traffic performance can recover before trust, resulting in a 77-day hidden vulnerability window. The results provide a trust-aware modeling basis for resilience analysis in CAV-enabled traffic networks.

eess.SY↗

MoE-TransMov: A Transformer-based Model for Next POI Prediction in Familiar & Unfamiliar Movements

Accurate prediction of the next point of interest (POI) within human mobility trajectories is essential for location-based services, as it enables more timely and personalized recommendations. In particular, with the rise of these approaches, studies have shown that users exhibit different POI choices in their familiar and unfamiliar areas, highlighting the importance of incorporating user familiarity into predictive models. However, existing methods often fail to distinguish between the movements of users in familiar and unfamiliar regions. To address this, we propose MoE-TransMov, a Transformer-based model with a Transformer model with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture designed to use one framework to capture distinct mobility patterns across different moving contexts without requiring separate training for certain data. Using user-check-in data, we classify movements into familiar and unfamiliar categories and develop a specialized expert network to improve prediction accuracy. Our approach integrates self-attention mechanisms and adaptive gating networks to dynamically select the most relevant expert models for different mobility contexts. Experiments on two real-world datasets, including the widely used but small open-source Foursquare NYC dataset and the large-scale Kyoto dataset collected with LY Corporation (Yahoo Japan Corporation), show that MoE-TransMov outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with notable improvements in Top-1, Top-5, Top-10 accuracy, and mean reciprocal rank (MRR). Given the results, we find that by using this approach, we can efficiently improve mobility predictions under different moving contexts, thereby enhancing the personalization of recommendation systems and advancing various urban applications.

cs.LG↗

Robust and Flexible Microtransit Design: Chance-Constrained Dial-a-Ride Problem with Soft Time Windows

Microtransit offers a promising blend of rideshare flexibility and public transit efficiency. In practice, it faces unanticipated but spatially aligned requests, passengers seeking to join ongoing schedules, leading to underutilized capacity and degraded service if not properly managed. At the same time, it must accommodate diverse passenger needs, from routine errands to time-sensitive trips such as medical appointments. To meet these expectations, incorporating time flexibility is essential. However, existing models seldom consider both spontaneous and heterogeneous demand, limiting their real-world applicability. We propose a robust and flexible microtransit framework that integrates time flexibility and demand uncertainty via a Chance-Constrained Dial-A-Ride Problem with Soft Time Windows (CCDARP-STW). Demand uncertainty is captured through nonlinear chance constraints with controllable violation probabilities, while time flexibility is modeled with soft time windows and penalized cost. We develop a bounded-support relaxation using limited statistical information to linearize the chance constraints and solve the model using a tailored Branch-and-Cut-and-Price (BCP) algorithm with a probabilistic dominance rule. This rule improves computational efficiency, reducing explored labels by 17.40% and CPU time by 22.27% in robust cases. A case study based on real-world Chicago data shows our framework yields 11.55 minutes and 11.13 miles of savings versus conventional microtransit, and achieves the highest service reliability (96.46%) among robust models.

math.OC↗

Data Mining in Transportation Networks with Graph Neural Networks: A Review and Outlook

Data mining in transportation networks (DMTNs) refers to using diverse types of spatio-temporal data for various transportation tasks, including pattern analysis, traffic prediction, and traffic controls. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are essential in many DMTN problems due to their capability to represent spatial correlations between entities. Between 2016 and 2024, the notable applications of GNNs in DMTNs have extended to multiple fields such as traffic prediction and operation. However, existing reviews have primarily focused on traffic prediction tasks. To fill this gap, this study provides a timely and insightful summary of GNNs in DMTNs, highlighting new progress in prediction and operation from academic and industry perspectives since 2023. First, we present and analyze various DMTN problems, followed by classical and recent GNN models. Second, we delve into key works in three areas: (1) traffic prediction, (2) traffic operation, and (3) industry involvement, such as Google Maps, Amap, and Baidu Maps. Along these directions, we discuss new research opportunities based on the significance of transportation problems and data availability. Finally, we compile resources such as data, code, and other learning materials to foster interdisciplinary communication. This review, driven by recent trends in GNNs in DMTN studies since 2023, could democratize abundant datasets and efficient GNN methods for various transportation problems including prediction and operation.

cs.LG↗

Mean-Field Approximation of Cooperative Constrained Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (CMARL)

Mean-Field Control (MFC) has recently been proven to be a scalable tool to approximately solve large-scale multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. However, these studies are typically limited to unconstrained cumulative reward maximization framework. In this paper, we show that one can use the MFC approach to approximate the MARL problem even in the presence of constraints. Specifically, we prove that, an $N$-agent constrained MARL problem, with state, and action spaces of each individual agents being of sizes $|\mathcal{X}|$, and $|\mathcal{U}|$ respectively, can be approximated by an associated constrained MFC problem with an error, $e\triangleq \mathcal{O}\left([\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}+\sqrt{|\mathcal{U}|}]/\sqrt{N}\right)$. In a special case where the reward, cost, and state transition functions are independent of the action distribution of the population, we prove that the error can be improved to $e=\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}/\sqrt{N})$. Also, we provide a Natural Policy Gradient based algorithm and prove that it can solve the constrained MARL problem within an error of $\mathcal{O}(e)$ with a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(e^{-6})$.

cs.LG↗

Long-term forecasts of statewide travel demand patterns using large-scale mobile phone GPS data: A case study of Indiana

The growth in availability of large-scale GPS mobility data from mobile devices has the potential to aid traditional travel demand models (TDMs) such as the four-step planning model, but those processing methods are not commonly used in practice. In this study, we show the application of trip generation and trip distribution modeling using GPS data from smartphones in the state of Indiana. This involves extracting trip segments from the data and inferring the phone users' home locations, adjusting for data representativeness, and using a data-driven travel time-based cost function for the trip distribution model. The trip generation and interchange patterns in the state are modeled for 2025, 2035, and 2045. Employment sectors like industry and retail are observed to influence trip making behavior more than other sectors. The travel growth is predicted to be mostly concentrated in the suburban regions, with a small decline in the urban cores. Further, although the majority of the growth in trip flows over the years is expected to come from the corridors between the major urban centers of the state, relative interzonal trip flow growth will likely be uniformly spread throughout the state. We also validate our results with the forecasts of two travel demand models, finding a difference of 5-15% in overall trip counts. Our GPS data-based demand model will contribute towards augmenting the conventional statewide travel demand model developed by the state and regional planning agencies.

econ.GN↗

Towards a generalized accessibility measure for transportation equity and efficiency

Locational measures of accessibility are widely used in urban and transportation planning to understand the impact of the transportation system on influencing people's access to places. However, there is a considerable lack of measurement standards and publicly available data. We propose a generalized measure of locational accessibility that has a comprehensible form for transportation planning analysis. This metric combines the cumulative opportunities approach with gravity-based measures and is capable of catering to multiple trip purposes, travel modes, cost thresholds, and scales of analysis. Using data from multiple publicly available datasets, this metric is computed by trip purpose and travel time threshold for all block groups in the United States, and the data is made publicly accessible. Further, case studies of three large metropolitan areas reveal substantial inefficiencies in transportation infrastructure, with the most inefficiency observed in sprawling and non-core urban areas, especially for bicycling. Subsequently, it is shown that targeted investment in facilities can contribute to a more equitable distribution of accessibility to essential shopping and service facilities. By assigning greater weights to socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods, the proposed metric formally incorporates equity considerations into transportation planning, contributing to a more equitable distribution of accessibility to essential services and facilities.

econ.EM↗

Near-perfect Coverage Manifold Estimation in Cellular Networks via conditional GAN

This paper presents a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that translates base station location (BSL) information of any Region-of-Interest (RoI) to location-dependent coverage probability values within a subset of that region, called the region-of-evaluation (RoE). We train our network utilizing the BSL data of India, the USA, Germany, and Brazil. In comparison to the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), our model improves the prediction error ($L_1$ difference between the coverage manifold generated by the network under consideration and that generated via simulation) by two orders of magnitude. Moreover, the cGAN-generated coverage manifolds appear to be almost visually indistinguishable from the ground truth.

cs.NI↗

Finding critical transitions of the post-disaster recovery using the sensitivity analysis of agent-based models

Frequent and intensive disasters make the repeated and uncertain post-disaster recovery process. Despite the importance of the successful recovery process, previous simulation studies on the post-disaster recovery process did not explore the sufficient number of household return decision model types, population sizes, and the corresponding critical transition conditions of the system. This paper simulates the recovery process in the agent-based model with multilayer networks to reveal the impact of household return decision model types and population sizes in a toy network. After that, this paper applies the agent-based model to the five selected counties affected by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 to check the urban-rural recovery differences by types of household return decision models. The agent-based model yields three conclusions. First, the threshold model can successfully substitute the binary logit model. Second, high thresholds and less than 1,000 populations perturb the recovery process, yielding critical transitions during the recovery process. Third, this study checks the urban-rural recovery value differences by different decision model types. This study highlights the importance of the threshold models and population sizes to check the critical transitions and urban-rural differences in the recovery process.

cs.CY↗

Comparison of home detection algorithms using smartphone GPS data

Estimation of people's home locations using location-based services data from smartphones is a common task in human mobility assessment. However, commonly used home detection algorithms (HDAs) are often arbitrary and unexamined. In this study, we review existing HDAs and examine five HDAs using eight high-quality mobile phone geolocation datasets. These include four commonly used HDAs as well as an HDA proposed in this work. To make quantitative comparisons, we propose three novel metrics to assess the quality of detected home locations and test them on eight datasets across four U.S. cities. We find that all three metrics show a consistent rank of HDAs' performances, with the proposed HDA outperforming the others. We infer that the temporal and spatial continuity of the geolocation data points matters more than the overall size of the data for accurate home detection. We also find that HDAs with high (and similar) performance metrics tend to create results with better consistency and closer to common expectations. Further, the performance deteriorates with decreasing data quality of the devices, though the patterns of relative performance persist. Finally, we show how the differences in home detection can lead to substantial differences in subsequent inferences using two case studies - (i) hurricane evacuation estimation, and (ii) correlation of mobility patterns with socioeconomic status. Our work contributes to improving the transparency of large-scale human mobility assessment applications.

cs.CY↗

Impact of Transportation Network Companies on Labor Supply and Wages for Taxi Drivers

While the growth of TNCs took a substantial part of ridership and asset value away from the traditional taxi industry, existing taxi market policy regulations and planning models remain to be reexamined, which requires reliable estimates of the sensitivity of labor supply and income levels in the taxi industry. This study aims to investigate the impact of TNCs on the labor supply of the taxi industry, estimate wage elasticity, and understand the changes in taxi drivers' work preferences. We introduce the wage decomposition method to quantify the effects of TNC trips on taxi drivers' work hours over time, based on taxi and TNC trip record data from 2013 to 2018 in New York City. The data are analyzed to evaluate the changes in overall market performances and taxi drivers' work behavior through statistical analyses, and our results show that the increase in TNC trips not only decreases the income level of taxi drivers but also discourages their willingness to work. We find that 1% increase in TNC trips leads to 0.28% reduction in the monthly revenue of the yellow taxi industry and 0.68% decrease in the monthly revenue of the green taxi industry in recent years. More importantly, we report that the work behavior of taxi drivers shifts from the widely accepted neoclassical standard behavior to the reference-dependent preference (RDP) behavior, which signifies a persistent trend of loss in labor supply for the taxi market and hints at the collapse of taxi industry if the growth of TNCs continues. In addition, we observe that yellow and green taxi drivers present different work preferences over time. Consistently increasing RDP behavior is found among yellow taxi drivers. Green taxi drivers were initially revenue maximizers but later turned into income targeting strategy

stat.AP↗

Supporting Post-disaster Recovery with Agent-based Modeling in Multilayer Socio-physical Networks

The examination of post-disaster recovery (PDR) in a socio-physical system enables us to elucidate the complex relationships between humans and infrastructures. Although existing studies have identified many patterns in the PDR process, they fall short of describing how individual recoveries contribute to the overall recovery of the system. To enhance the understanding of individual return behavior and the recovery of point-of-interests (POIs), we propose an agent-based model (ABM), called PostDisasterSim. We apply the model to analyze the recovery of five counties in Texas following Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Specifically, we construct a three-layer network comprising the human layer, the social infrastructure layer, and the physical infrastructure layer, using mobile phone location data and POI data. Based on prior studies and a household survey, we develop the ABM to simulate how evacuated individuals return to their homes, and social and physical infrastructures recover. By implementing the ABM, we unveil the heterogeneity in recovery dynamics in terms of agent types, housing types, household income levels, and geographical locations. Moreover, simulation results across nine scenarios quantitatively demonstrate the positive effects of social and physical infrastructure improvement plans. This study can assist disaster scientists in uncovering nuanced recovery patterns and policymakers in translating policies like resource allocation into practice.

cs.CY↗

Mean-Field Control based Approximation of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Presence of a Non-decomposable Shared Global State

Mean Field Control (MFC) is a powerful approximation tool to solve large-scale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. However, the success of MFC relies on the presumption that given the local states and actions of all the agents, the next (local) states of the agents evolve conditionally independent of each other. Here we demonstrate that even in a MARL setting where agents share a common global state in addition to their local states evolving conditionally independently (thus introducing a correlation between the state transition processes of individual agents), the MFC can still be applied as a good approximation tool. The global state is assumed to be non-decomposable i.e., it cannot be expressed as a collection of local states of the agents. We compute the approximation error as $\mathcal{O}(e)$ where $e=\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\left[\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|} +\sqrt{|\mathcal{U}|}\right]$. The size of the agent population is denoted by the term $N$, and $|\mathcal{X}|, |\mathcal{U}|$ respectively indicate the sizes of (local) state and action spaces of individual agents. The approximation error is found to be independent of the size of the shared global state space. We further demonstrate that in a special case if the reward and state transition functions are independent of the action distribution of the population, then the error can be improved to $e=\frac{\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}}{\sqrt{N}}$. Finally, we devise a Natural Policy Gradient based algorithm that solves the MFC problem with $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$ sample complexity and obtains a policy that is within $\mathcal{O}(\max\{e,ε\})$ error of the optimal MARL policy for any $ε>0$.

cs.LG↗

On the Near-Optimality of Local Policies in Large Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We show that in a cooperative $N$-agent network, one can design locally executable policies for the agents such that the resulting discounted sum of average rewards (value) well approximates the optimal value computed over all (including non-local) policies. Specifically, we prove that, if $|\mathcal{X}|, |\mathcal{U}|$ denote the size of state, and action spaces of individual agents, then for sufficiently small discount factor, the approximation error is given by $\mathcal{O}(e)$ where $e\triangleq \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\left[\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}+\sqrt{|\mathcal{U}|}\right]$. Moreover, in a special case where the reward and state transition functions are independent of the action distribution of the population, the error improves to $\mathcal{O}(e)$ where $e\triangleq \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}$. Finally, we also devise an algorithm to explicitly construct a local policy. With the help of our approximation results, we further establish that the constructed local policy is within $\mathcal{O}(\max\{e,ε\})$ distance of the optimal policy, and the sample complexity to achieve such a local policy is $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$, for any $ε>0$.

cs.LG↗

Spatial Structure of City Population Growth

We show here that population growth, resolved at the county level, is spatially heterogeneous both among and within the U.S. metropolitan statistical areas. Our analysis of data for over 3,100 U.S. counties reveals that annual population flows, resulting from domestic migration during the 2015 - 2019 period, are much larger than natural demographic growth, and are primarily responsible for this heterogeneous growth. More precisely, we show that intra-city flows are generally along a negative population density gradient, while inter-city flows are concentrated in high-density core areas. Intra-city flows are anisotropic and generally directed towards external counties of cities, driving asymmetrical urban sprawl. Such domestic migration dynamics are also responsible for tempering local population shocks by redistributing inflows within a given city. This "spill-over" effect leads to a smoother population dynamics at the county level, in contrast to that observed at the city level. Understanding the spatial structure of domestic migration flows is a key ingredient for analyzing their drivers and consequences, thus representing a crucial knowledge for urban policy makers and planners.

physics.soc-ph↗

Deep Learning based Coverage and Rate Manifold Estimation in Cellular Networks

This article proposes Convolutional Neural Network-based Auto Encoder (CNN-AE) to predict location-dependent rate and coverage probability of a network from its topology. We train the CNN utilising BS location data of India, Brazil, Germany, and the USA and compare its performance with stochastic geometry (SG) based analytical models. In comparison to the best-fitted SG-based model, CNN-AE improves the coverage and rate prediction errors by a margin of as large as $40\%$ and $25\%$ respectively. As an application, we propose a low complexity, provably convergent algorithm that, using trained CNN-AE, can compute locations of new BSs that need to be deployed in a network in order to satisfy pre-defined spatially heterogeneous performance goals.

cs.NI↗

Can Mean Field Control (MFC) Approximate Cooperative Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) with Non-Uniform Interaction?

Mean-Field Control (MFC) is a powerful tool to solve Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. Recent studies have shown that MFC can well-approximate MARL when the population size is large and the agents are exchangeable. Unfortunately, the presumption of exchangeability implies that all agents uniformly interact with one another which is not true in many practical scenarios. In this article, we relax the assumption of exchangeability and model the interaction between agents via an arbitrary doubly stochastic matrix. As a result, in our framework, the mean-field `seen' by different agents are different. We prove that, if the reward of each agent is an affine function of the mean-field seen by that agent, then one can approximate such a non-uniform MARL problem via its associated MFC problem within an error of $e=\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}[\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|} + \sqrt{|\mathcal{U}|}])$ where $N$ is the population size and $|\mathcal{X}|$, $|\mathcal{U}|$ are the sizes of state and action spaces respectively. Finally, we develop a Natural Policy Gradient (NPG) algorithm that can provide a solution to the non-uniform MARL with an error $\mathcal{O}(\max\{e,ε\})$ and a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$ for any $ε>0$.

cs.LG↗