CRII: CPS: CityLines: Designing Urban Hub-and-Spoke Transportation System with Data-Driven Cyber-Control

In today's cities, both public and private transits have clear limitations to fulfill passengers' needs for quality of experience (QoE): (a) private transits have high transit fare; (b) with fixed time table/routes, public transits fail to timely provide adequate supply to match the time-varying trip demands. This project develops CityLines, a transformative urban transit system, employing hybrid hub-and-spoke transit service with shared shuttles. The proposed CityLines system routes urban trips among spokes through a few hubs or direct paths, with travel time as short as private transits and fare as low as public transits.

To develop CityLines system, this project investigates three innovative ideas. First, A cyber-analytics module is developed to conduct a series of trip-centered analysis, including trip demand prediction, trip QoE modeling, and incentive mechanism analysis. Second, a unifying hybrid hub-and-spoke framework is developed to quantify and address various design choices and trade-offs. Third, novel cyber-control methods are designed to guarantee the system scalability (enabling real-time transit service planning for urban scale trip demands), adaptability (allowing hub relocation and route re-planning to cope with trip demand dynamics), reliability (to traffic disruptions), and compatibility (providing inter-transit coordination with other transit services).

CityLines system has the potential to reduce the overall travel time, for commute, grocery, entertainment, and more. It also has the potential to reduce pollution and emissions to green the urban environments. It also has the potential to improve the urban trip convenience, where passengers do not need to worry about the trip paths or missing a stop. CityLines system will be a nice step towards a greener, more convenient, and vibrant smart city. Educational activities include curriculum development and training of students in the areas of cyber-physical systems and urban computing. Result dissemination is planned via publication in relevant peer-reviewed conferences and journals.