Personalization of future urban mobility

In the past few years, we have been experiencing rapid growth of new mobility solutions fueled by a myriad of innovations in technologies such as automated vehicles and in business models such as shared-ride services. The emerging mobility solutions are often required to be profitable, sustainable, and efficient while serving heterogeneous needs of mobility consumers. Given high-resolution consumer mobility behavior collected from smartphones and other GPS-enabled devices, the operational management strategies for future urban mobility can be personalized and serve for various system objectives. This thesis focuses on the personalization of future urban mobility through the personalized menu optimization model. The model built upon individual consumer's choice behavior generates a personalized menu for app-based mobility solutions. It integrates behavioral modeling of consumer mobility choice with optimization objectives. Individual choice behavior is modeled through logit mixture and the parameters are estimated with a hierarchical Bayes (HB) procedure. In this thesis, we first present an enhancement to HB procedure with alternative priors for covariance matrix estimation in order to improve the estimation performance. We also evaluate the benefits of personalization through a Boston case study based on real travel survey data. In addition, we present a sequential personalized menu optimization algorithm that addresses trade-off between exploration (learn uncertain demand of menus) and exploitation (offer the best menu based on current knowledge). We illustrate the benefits of exploration under different conditions including different types of heterogeneity.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Song, Xiang, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moshe E. Ben-Akiva and Bilge Atasoy.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120637

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/120637