Trip-based mobile sensor deployment for drive-by sensing with bus fleets

Authors

Wen Ji
Ke Han
Tao Liu

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2023

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, mode - bus, operations - coordination, operations - scheduling, operations - reliability, infrastructure - fleet management, technology - intelligent transport systems

Keywords

Bus network, Crowdsensing, Integer programs, Large-scale computation, Sensor deployment

Abstract

Drive-by sensing (i.e. vehicle-based mobile sensing) is an emerging data collection paradigm that leverages vehicle mobilities to scan a city at low costs. It represents a positive social externality of urban transport activities. Bus transit systems are widely considered in drive-by sensing due to extensive spatial coverage, reliable operations, and low maintenance costs. It is critical for the underlying monitoring scenario (e.g. air quality, traffic state, and road roughness) to assign a limited number of sensors to a bus fleet to ensure their optimal spatial–temporal distribution. In this paper we present a trip-based sensor deployment problem, which explicitly considers timetabled trips that must be executed by the fleet while a portion of them perform sensing tasks. To address the computational challenge in large-scale instances, we design a multi-stage solution framework that decouples the spatial–temporal structures of the sensing task through line pre-selection and bi-level optimization. As a result, the computational complexity is reduced to be sub-linear w.r.t. the number of lines, rather than combinatorial w.r.t. the number of buses in existing vehicle-based approaches. A real-world case study covering 400 km in central Chengdu demonstrates the effectiveness of the model in solving large-scale problems. It is found that coordinating bus scheduling and sensing tasks can substantially increase the spatial–temporal sensing coverage. We also provide a few model extensions and recommendation for practice regarding the application of this method.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Recommended Citation

Ji, W., Han, K., & Liu, T. (2023). Trip-based mobile sensor deployment for drive-by sensing with bus fleets. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 157, 104404.