CityX Lab @UNSW

Congratulations to PhD students Tanapon Lee and Mudabber Ashfaq for successful confirmation of their PhD at UNSW rCITI, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tanapon's PhD topic is on modelling large-scale pedestrian networks and Mudabber's PhD focuses on contagion-based modelling of urban congestion propagation.

Dr. Omer Verbas visited the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rICIT) at UNSW and gave a seminar on "Modeling Future Mobility Impacts using the POLARIS Agent-Based Transportation Simulator". POLARIS is an open-source agent-based simulation platform developed by the Argonne National Lab in the US. We hope Omer had a great time in Sydney and we wish a safe trip back to the US.

On July 20, 2018, we had the pleasure to host Lauren Weinstein, the Chief Data Officer from Transport for London at UNSW. With Dr. Taha Rashidi, Prof. Mark Hickman (visiting from UQ) and Lauren, we toured around the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) and stopped by the TracsLab for a quick demo of our automated vehicle experiments with driving simulators led by A/Prof Dixit. We also had the chance to present our past and ongoing research at CityX lab with a discussion around urban data analytics and visualization using smart card data and congestion pricing. We wish Lauren all the best in her position and we hope to host her back again in future.

On Thursday evening, March 15, Dr. Saberi gave a short presentation to a crowd of young professionals in transportation as part of the AITPM Young Professional Network event series. The event was kindly hosted at the SMEC North Sydney's office. Dr. Saberi spoke about the importance of data visualisation in understanding cities and showcased a few of the previous visualisation projects the CityX lab had developed.

Picture: Alen Krljic from SMEC presenting on the use of microsimulation in assessing transport projects.

I am pleased to announce that we have now moved to UNSW Sydney. We are part of the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) that is based in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. We will continue our focus on Melbourne but will also conduct gradually increasing research on Sydney over time. More updates will be shared over the next few weeks.

Homayoun, our newest PhD student, attended the international summer school on Network Functional Dynamics held in TU Dresden, Germany. He presented our ongoing research on urban mobility networks and contributed to a new project on multiplex trade networks. We thank the organizers and sponsors of the summer school for hosting Homayoun.

On Friday, 18 August, we had the pleasure of welcoming back Richard on campus for a short visit. Richard is the first PhD graduate of our CityX lab. His PhD dissertation focused on macroscopic modeling of road crashes when unobserved heterogeneity and spatial correlation are present. He works as a road safety analyst at the Main Roads Western Australia, Perth. We wish him best of luck in his career.

Congratulations to Frank Gu for acceptance of his paper, previously presented at ISTTT22 in Chicago July 2017, to be published in Transportation Research Part C. 

Link to ISTTT proceedings: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352146517303289

Title: A Big Data Approach for Clustering and Calibration of Link Fundamental Diagrams for Large-Scale Network Simulation Applications

Abstract: Existing methods for calibrating link fundamental diagrams (FDs) often focus on a limited number of links and use grouping strategies that are largely dependent on roadway physical attributes alone. In this study, we propose a big data-driven two-stage clustering framework to calibrate link FDs for freeway networks. The first stage captures, under normal traffic state, the variations of link FDs over multiple days based on which links are clustered in the second stage. Two methods, i.e. the standard k-means algorithm combined with hierarchical clustering and a modified hierarchical clustering based on the Fréchet distance, are applied in the first stage to obtain the FD parameter matrix for each link. The calibrated matrices are input into the second stage where the modified hierarchical clustering is re-employed as a static approach resulting in multiple clusters of links. To further consider the variations of link FDs, the static approach is extended by modifying the similarity measure through the principle component analysis (PCA). The resulting multivariate time-series clustering models the distributions of the FD parameters as a dynamic approach. The proposed framework is applied on the Melbourne freeway network using one-year worth of loop detector data. Results have shown that (a) similar roadway physical attributes do not necessarily result in similar link FDs, (b) the connectivity-based approach performs better in clustering link FDs as compared with the centroid-based approach, and (c) the proposed framework helps achieving a better understanding of the spatial distribution of links with similar FDs and the associated variations and distributions of the FD parameters.

For about two months, we were hosting Sushmitha Sree from IIT Bombay on a short research internship. Sushmitha demonstrated a great enthusiasm and interest in transportation research and contributed to our ongoing work on pedestrian modelling of the Richmond Station. Thanks to Homayoun and Neda for their help, Sushmitha was able to improve the simulation model and showcase a nice application. We wish Sushmitha best of luck in her future studies and safe travels back to India. Hope to see her back in Melbourne.

On July 12, we welcomed Prof Kelly Clifton from Portland State University on campus for a short visit. Members of the CityX team had the opportunity to meet with her and present their research. It was a great pleasure to reconnect with Kelly. We wish her best of luck and safe travels back to the United States.

On June 29, we had the pleasure to welcome Prof Eric Miller from University of Toronto at Monash University. Members of the CityX team had a chance to meet with Prof Miller and gave a him a brief summary of our research projects. Prof Miller presented his ongoing research on activity-based model of Toronto TASHA.

CityX research was well represented at the NetSci 2017 which was held in Indianapolis, June 19-23. We had a poster presentation on community detection in mobility networks by Ingrida and a lectern presentation on taxi mobility by Homayoun. Dr. Saberi was also gave an invited talk on transportation networks at the Urban Systems and Network Science satellite workshop organized by Marta Gonzalez from MIT.

CityX team members and their families got together at Dr. Saberi's house over a multi-cultural dinner, enjoying a variety of food to celebrate many of their achievements. We welcomed Homayoun as the newest member of the team. We congratulated Reza for accepting a job offer at ARRB and Richard for his PhD completion and accepting a job offer from Main Roads Western Australia in Perth. Also congratulations to Frank, Sajjad and Richard for their recent publications in ISTTT, Transportation Research Record, and Analytic Methods in Accident Research. All were amazing reasons to get together and celebrate.

Congratulations to Dr. Ingrida Steponavice (research fellow jointly supervised by Dr. Mohsen Ramezani at the University of Sydney) for acceptance of her abstract for presentation at the NetSci 2017, the flagship conference of the Network Science Society, which will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana in June 2017.

Steponavic, I., Ramezani, M., Saberi, M. (2017) Detecting Community Structure in Mobility Networks. Submitted to the NetSci 2017, 21-23 June, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Today the Monash Infrastructure (MI) Institute was launched by the Honourable Wade Noonan MP, Minister for Industry and Employment and Minister for Resources, Professor Margaret Gardner AO, President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Frieder Seible, Dean of Faculties of Engineering and IT, and Professor Ana Deletic, Associate Dean of Research of the Faculty of Engineering and Director of the MI. CityX research is well situated within the focus areas of the MI, namely transport and urban planning and management research.

Congratulations to Homayoun Hamedmoghadam-Rafati (incoming PhD student), Dr. Ingrida Steponavice and Dr. Reza Mohajerpoor (research fellows jointly supervised by Dr. Mohsen Ramezani at University of Sydney) for acceptance of their papers for presentation at the 20th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC 2017) which will be held in Toulouse, France in July 2017.

Hamedmoghadam-Rafati, H., Steponavic, I., Ramezani, M., Saberi, M. (2017) A Complex Network Analysis of Macroscopic Structure of Taxi Trips. Submitted to the 20th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), 9-14 July, Toulouse, France.

Mohajerpoor, R., Saberi, M., Ramezani, M. (2017) Delay Variability Optimization Using Shockwave Theory for an Undersaturated Isolated Intersection. Submitted to the 20th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), 9-14 July, Toulouse, France.

Dr. Saberi spent a few weeks in the US in February 2017, visiting, initiating collaboration, and giving seminars at MIT, Michigan State University, and University of South Florida. Thanks to Dr. Ali Zockaie, Dr. Mehrnaz Ghamami, Dr. Neema Nassir, Dr. Marta Gonzalez, and Dr. Robert Bertini for the hospitality and organizing the visits.