Serio Agriesti

Serio Agriesti, Vladimir Kuzmanovski, Jaakko Hollmén et al.

The use of Agent-Based and Activity-Based modeling in transportation is rising due to the capability of addressing complex applications such as disruptive trends (e.g., remote working and automation) or the design and assessment of disaggregated management strategies. Still, the broad adoption of large-scale disaggregate models is not materializing due to the inherently high complexity and computational needs. Activity-based models focused on behavioral theory, for example, may involve hundreds of parameters that need to be calibrated to match the detailed socio-economical characteristics of the population for any case study. This paper tackles this issue by proposing a novel Bayesian Optimization approach incorporating a surrogate model in the form of an improved Random Forest, designed to automate the calibration process of the behavioral parameters. The proposed method is tested on a case study for the city of Tallinn, Estonia, where the model to be calibrated consists of 477 behavioral parameters, using the SimMobility MT software. Satisfactory performance is achieved in the major indicators defined for the calibration process: the error for the overall number of trips is equal to 4% and the average error in the OD matrix is 15.92 vehicles per day.

Amalie Roark, Serio Agriesti, Francisco Camara Pereira et al.

The Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram is a popular tool used to describe traffic dynamics in an aggregated way, with applications ranging from traffic control to incident analysis. However, estimating the MFD for a given network requires large numbers of loop detectors, which is not always available in practice. This article proposes a framework harnessing meta-learning, a subcategory of machine learning that trains models to understand and adapt to new tasks on their own, to alleviate the data scarcity challenge. The developed model is trained and tested by leveraging data from multiple cities and exploiting it to model the MFD of other cities with different shares of detectors and topological structures. The proposed meta-learning framework is applied to an ad-hoc Multi-Task Physics-Informed Neural Network, specifically designed to estimate the MFD. Results show an average MSE improvement in flow prediction ranging between ~ 17500 and 36000 (depending on the subset of loop detectors tested). The meta-learning framework thus successfully generalizes across diverse urban settings and improves performance on cities with limited data, demonstrating the potential of using meta-learning when a limited number of detectors is available. Finally, the proposed framework is validated against traditional transfer learning approaches and tested with FitFun, a non-parametric model from the literature, to prove its transferability.