Hasan Poonawala

Supriyo Ghosh, Sean Laguna, Shiau Hong Lim et al.

Air traffic control is an example of a highly challenging operational problem that is readily amenable to human expertise augmentation via decision support technologies. In this paper, we propose a new intelligent decision making framework that leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to dynamically suggest adjustments of aircraft speeds in real-time. The goal of the system is to enhance the ability of an air traffic controller to provide effective guidance to aircraft to avoid air traffic congestion, near-miss situations, and to improve arrival timeliness. We develop a novel deep ensemble MARL method that can concisely capture the complexity of the air traffic control problem by learning to efficiently arbitrate between the decisions of a local kernel-based RL model and a wider-reaching deep MARL model. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on an open-source air traffic management simulator developed by Eurocontrol. Extensive empirical results on a real-world dataset including thousands of aircraft demonstrate the feasibility of using multi-agent RL for the problem of en-route air traffic control and show that our proposed deep ensemble MARL method significantly outperforms three state-of-the-art benchmark approaches.

Sebastien Blandin, Laura Wynter, Hasan Poonawala et al.

Increasing urban concentration raises operational challenges that can benefit from integrated monitoring and decision support. Such complex systems need to leverage the full stack of analytical methods, from state estimation using multi-sensor fusion for situational awareness, to prediction and computation of optimal responses. The FASTER platform that we describe in this work, deployed at nation scale and handling 1.5 billion public transport trips a year, offers such a full stack of techniques for this large-scale, real-time problem. FASTER provides fine-grained situational awareness and real-time decision support with the objective of improving the public transport commuter experience. The methods employed range from statistical machine learning to agent-based simulation and mixed-integer optimization. In this work we present an overview of the challenges and methods involved, with details of the commuter movement prediction module, as well as a discussion of open problems.

Baoyang Song, Hasan Poonawala, Laura Wynter et al.

The preponderance of connected devices provides unprecedented opportunities for fine-grained monitoring of the public infrastructure. However while classical models expect high quality application-specific data streams, the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that of an abundance of disparate and noisy datasets from connected devices. In this context, we consider the problem of estimation of the level of service of a city-wide public transport network. We first propose a robust unsupervised model for train movement inference from wifi traces, via the application of robust clustering methods to a one dimensional spatio-temporal setting. We then explore the extent to which the demand-supply gap can be estimated from connected devices. We propose a classification model of real-time commuter patterns, including both a batch training phase and an online learning component. We describe our deployment architecture and assess our system accuracy on a large-scale anonymized dataset comprising more than 10 billion records.