Fan Zhang

Fan Zhang, Vincent K. N. Lau, Ling Shi

In this paper, we consider a networked control system (NCS) in which an dynamic plant system is connected to a controller via a temporally correlated wireless fading channel. We focus on communication power design at the sensor to minimize a weighted average state estimation error at the remote controller subject to an average transmit power constraint of the sensor. The power control optimization problem is formulated as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a novel continuous-time perturbation approach and derive an asymptotically optimal closed-form value function for the MDP. Under this approximation, we propose a low complexity dynamic power control solution which has an event- driven control structure. We also establish technical conditions for asymptotic optimality, and sufficient conditions for NCS stability under the proposed scheme.

Xiao Wang, Hao Si, Fan Zhang et al.

Multivariate time series analysis has long been one of the key research topics in the field of artificial intelligence. However, analyzing complex time series data remains a challenging and unresolved problem due to its high dimensionality, dynamic nature, and complex interactions among variables. Inspired by the strong structural modeling capability of hypergraphs, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based time series transformer backbone network, termed HGTS-Former, to address the multivariate coupling in time series data. Specifically, given the multivariate time series signal, we first normalize and embed each patch into tokens. Then, we adopt the multi-head self-attention to enhance the temporal representation of each patch. The hierarchical hypergraphs are constructed to aggregate the temporal patterns within each channel and fine-grained relations between different variables. After that, we convert the hyperedge into node features through the EdgeToNode module and adopt the feed-forward network to further enhance the output features. Extensive experiments conducted on two multivariate time series tasks and eight datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed HGTS-Former. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Time_Series_Analysis.

Xiaocheng Tang, Zhiwei Qin, Fan Zhang et al.

Recent works on ride-sharing order dispatching have highlighted the importance of taking into account both the spatial and temporal dynamics in the dispatching process for improving the transportation system efficiency. At the same time, deep reinforcement learning has advanced to the point where it achieves superhuman performance in a number of fields. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based solution for order dispatching and we conduct large scale online A/B tests on DiDi's ride-dispatching platform to show that the proposed method achieves significant improvement on both total driver income and user experience related metrics. In particular, we model the ride dispatching problem as a Semi Markov Decision Process to account for the temporal aspect of the dispatching actions. To improve the stability of the value iteration with nonlinear function approximators like neural networks, we propose Cerebellar Value Networks (CVNet) with a novel distributed state representation layer. We further derive a regularized policy evaluation scheme for CVNet that penalizes large Lipschitz constant of the value network for additional robustness against adversarial perturbation and noises. Finally, we adapt various transfer learning methods to CVNet for increased learning adaptability and efficiency across multiple cities. We conduct extensive offline simulations based on real dispatching data as well as online AB tests through the DiDi's platform. Results show that CVNet consistently outperforms other recently proposed dispatching methods. We finally show that the performance can be further improved through the efficient use of transfer learning.

Xiaocheng Tang, Fan Zhang, Zhiwei Qin et al.

Large ride-hailing platforms, such as DiDi, Uber and Lyft, connect tens of thousands of vehicles in a city to millions of ride demands throughout the day, providing great promises for improving transportation efficiency through the tasks of order dispatching and vehicle repositioning. Existing studies, however, usually consider the two tasks in simplified settings that hardly address the complex interactions between the two, the real-time fluctuations between supply and demand, and the necessary coordinations due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In this paper we propose a unified value-based dynamic learning framework (V1D3) for tackling both tasks. At the center of the framework is a globally shared value function that is updated continuously using online experiences generated from real-time platform transactions. To improve the sample-efficiency and the robustness, we further propose a novel periodic ensemble method combining the fast online learning with a large-scale offline training scheme that leverages the abundant historical driver trajectory data. This allows the proposed framework to adapt quickly to the highly dynamic environment, to generalize robustly to recurrent patterns and to drive implicit coordinations among the population of managed vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets show considerably improvements over other recently proposed methods on both tasks. Particularly, V1D3 outperforms the first prize winners of both dispatching and repositioning tracks in the KDD Cup 2020 RL competition, achieving state-of-the-art results on improving both total driver income and user experience related metrics.

Yan Jiao, Xiaocheng Tang, Zhiwei Qin et al.

We present a new practical framework based on deep reinforcement learning and decision-time planning for real-world vehicle repositioning on ride-hailing (a type of mobility-on-demand, MoD) platforms. Our approach learns the spatiotemporal state-value function using a batch training algorithm with deep value networks. The optimal repositioning action is generated on-demand through value-based policy search, which combines planning and bootstrapping with the value networks. For the large-fleet problems, we develop several algorithmic features that we incorporate into our framework and that we demonstrate to induce coordination among the algorithmically-guided vehicles. We benchmark our algorithm with baselines in a ride-hailing simulation environment to demonstrate its superiority in improving income efficiency meausred by income-per-hour. We have also designed and run a real-world experiment program with regular drivers on a major ride-hailing platform. We have observed significantly positive results on key metrics comparing our method with experienced drivers who performed idle-time repositioning based on their own expertise.

Juanjuan Zhao, Fan Zhang, Lai Tu et al.

Nowadays, metro systems play an important role in meeting the urban transportation demand in large cities. The understanding of passenger route choice is critical for public transit management. The wide deployment of Automated Fare Collection(AFC) systems opens up a new opportunity. However, only each trip's tap-in and tap-out timestamp and stations can be directly obtained from AFC system records; the train and route chosen by a passenger are unknown, which are necessary to solve our problem. While existing methods work well in some specific situations, they don't work for complicated situations. In this paper, we propose a solution that needs no additional equipment or human involvement than the AFC systems. We develop a probabilistic model that can estimate from empirical analysis how the passenger flows are dispatched to different routes and trains. We validate our approach using a large scale data set collected from the Shenzhen metro system. The measured results provide us with useful inputs when building the passenger path choice model.