Intelligent Transportation Systems

Latest papers 200

Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

MoE Enhanced Federated Learning for Spatiotemporal Prediction

Traffic prediction is fundamental to intelligent transportation systems and urban computing, yet many cities continue to suffer from traffic data scarcity due to limited sensor deployment and uneven urban development. Cross-city knowledge transfer has thus attracted increasing attention, enabling data-rich cities to assist data-scarce ones. However, centralized approaches raise privacy concerns, while existing federated methods struggle with pronounced spatiotemporal heterogeneity across cities. To address these challenges, we propose MoE-FedTP, a personalized federated cross-city spatiotemporal prediction framework based on lightweight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks. MoE-FedTP first employs spatiotemporal neural networks to extract features from both source and target cities, then introduces a set of expert networks derived from different source cities through partial parameter sharing. A gating mechanism dynamically fuses the experts to capture diverse traffic dynamics, achieving fine-grained modeling of urban heterogeneity while preserving privacy. Experiments on four real-world traffic datasets show that MoE-FedTP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art cross-city and federated learning baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing prediction accuracy for data-scarce cities.
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Traffic Prediction at Scale: A Systematic Study of STGCN Architectural Depth

Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have become the dominant approach for traffic prediction, yet their computational requirements pose challenges for practical deployment in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). While recent work has proposed efficient alternatives to STGNNs, a fundamental question remains unexplored: are these architectures themselves over-parameterised? We examine this question using the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN), one of the most widely adopted models in this domain. Through systematic experiments across four diverse traffic datasets, we compare 1-block, 2-block (standard), and 3-block STGCN variants. Our findings reveal that the single-block architecture achieves optimal performance for short-term prediction (10 mins) on three of four datasets, while incurring only marginal degradation (≤\leq1.8% relative error) at longer horizons. Crucially, the 2-block variant incurs 61% higher CPU inference latency and 37% lower throughput relative to 1-block -- substantial overhead for resource-constrained ITS deployment. The 3-block architecture offers no favourable tradeoff, more than doubling computational cost for <<0.5% relative improvement. These results suggest that the default 2-block STGCN may be over-parameterised for many applications, with implications for both practitioners deploying traffic prediction systems and researchers benchmarking efficiency-focused methods.
Jun 8, 2026eess.SY

Revisiting mesoscopic traffic flow simulation in SUMO: Limitations, analysis, and an alternative

Mesoscopic traffic flow models combines the merits of both macroscopic and microscopic models by capturing individual vehicle behavior in great detail and remaining the computational efficiency. At the time of this study, the mesoscopic model proposed by Eissfeldt (2004) is used in Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO). The movement of vehicles is governed by dynamic headways between edges. However, the model does not fully comply with the principle of the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model. Several problems are identified, including the incomplete consideration of queue dynamics and the limited implementation of backward traveling spaces. Two case study scenarios demonstrate that the problems lead to unrealistic onset and recovery pattern of congestion. The magnitude of congestion is generally underestimated with this model. To address these drawbacks, a proper mesoscopic discrete-time implementation of link transmission model, which follows the LWR principle, is proposed. By explicitly incorporating backward traveling spaces to capture queue spillback phenomena, the proposed model provides a more precise representation of congestion dynamics. The link density outputs are consistent with the kinematic wave theory and the microscopic traffic simulation in SUMO, thus verifying its theoretical accuracy.
Jun 8, 2026cs.AI

DynaOD: Dynamic Origin-Destination Flow Generation with Discrete-to-Continuous Temporal Semantic Modeling

Dynamic origin-destination (OD) flow generation seeks to synthesize realistic mobility dynamics from temporal context alone, without relying on historical OD observations. A key challenge is to translate semantic temporal signals into temporally coherent OD patterns while preserving the inherent spatial heterogeneity of urban regions. We propose DynaOD, a semantic-driven framework that models temporal dynamics through two complementary perspectives: discrete directional trends that characterize qualitative shifts in urban activity patterns, and continuous temporal evolution that captures how such shifts unfold over time. By jointly encoding these temporal semantics, the framework constructs time-varying region representations that condition pretrained static OD generators in a lightweight and plug-and-play fashion. This modular design further supports scalable deployment and cross-city transferability. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show that our method consistently outperforms representative baselines in both predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/csjiezhao/DynaOD.
Jun 7, 2026cs.AI

A Resilience-as-a-Service assessment framework for coordinated disruption response in interdependent urban transit systems

Urban public transport disruptions require rapid response strategies, yet existing studies rarely provide a decision support framework to compare alternative disruption response solutions using a common set of dynamic, passenger, operator, and environment oriented indicators. This paper proposes a KPI-driven, time-indexed framework to assess the resilience of disruption response solutions in urban transit systems. The framework combines an optimization model with a behavioral evaluation in agent-based simulation. It also underlays the secondary service degradation induced on helper lines when in-service vehicles are withdrawn to support the disrupted corridor. Rather than treating resilience as a single score, it evaluates complementary dimensions including vulnerability, adaptability, robustness, resilience loss, responsiveness, cost-based performance, emissions, and equity. The framework is implemented for the RER B transit line in the Ile-de-France (Paris) network. Results show that the coordinated strategy provides the most balanced resilience profile, combining high service continuity with lower total disruption cost than single mode alternatives, while also improving equity and maintaining competitive environmental performance. Sensitivity analysis further identifies the disruption conditions under which coordinated multimodal response is most valuable.
Jun 7, 2026eess.SY

Platooning Connected, Autonomous, and Human-Driven Vehicles: A Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Approach

Conventionally, existing vehicle platooning approaches are designed for connected vehicles, typically including connected autonomous vehicles and connected human-driven vehicles. Non-connected vehicles, such as non-connected autonomous or human-driven vehicles, are not incorporated. As a result, these platooning approaches may not properly reflect real-world mixed traffic conditions at the current stage. To address this limitation, this study proposes a hybrid platooning pattern that conditionally permits non-connected vehicles to join platoons, thereby enhancing platooning diversity and flexibility. However, it was found that the unregulated integration of non-connected vehicles can trigger rapid platoon expansion, significantly amplifying the risk of disturbance propagation in traffic flow. This, in turn, exacerbates the inherent conflict between traffic throughput and stability. To mitigate these challenges, this paper further develops a hybrid platooning control strategy based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). This strategy integrates vehicle dynamics, platoon topology, and traffic flow states through a multi-level state representation network, enabling a dynamic trade-off between traffic capacity and stability. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed strategy effectively suppresses velocity disturbance propagation by dynamically optimizing platoon structures, thereby significantly enhancing the stability and safety of mixed traffic while reducing fuel consumption and emissions.
Jun 5, 2026cs.CV

Cross-View Urban Traffic Dataset: Drone-Supervised Ground Truth for Monocular Bird's-Eye View Localization

We introduce a dataset and benchmark for cross-view urban traffic perception built from synchronized ego-centric bicycle videos and aerial drone videos recorded at real urban intersections. The benchmark targets two linked tasks: cross-view identity matching between street-view and drone-view object tracks, and ego-to-bird's-eye-view prediction using aerial supervision. In contrast to prior urban driving and V2X datasets, our benchmark provides identity-level alignment across radically different viewpoints together with standardized evaluation, annotation tooling, and baseline implementations. This setting is motivated by intersection-centric traffic analysis, where identity preservation, local interactions, and global spatial structure must be reasoned about jointly across views. We evaluate methods at both the track and frame levels, including cross-view ID precision/recall/IDF1, near--far breakdowns, temporal stability, and consistency metrics. We also provide baseline results for wedge-based cross-view matching and for three BEV prediction baselines: inverse perspective mapping, a MonoLayout-style learned baseline, and a regression baseline. The results show that the benchmark is feasible but challenging: cross-view matching achieves strong recall yet remains limited by over-assignment and temporal inconsistency, while ego-to-BEV prediction benefits from aerial supervision but remains far from saturated under lightweight monocular sensing. We hope that this benchmark will support future research on cross-view perception, urban scene alignment, and ego-to-global traffic understanding.
Jun 5, 2026stat.AP

An Integrated Roadside Sensing and Communication Framework for Vulnerable Road User Safety at Signalized Intersections

Vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for approximately half of urban traffic deaths globally, with intersections concentrating a disproportionate share of these casualties. Recent reviews of sensing technology for VRU protection have cataloged dozens of single-sensor and dual-sensor deployments, yet none of the surveyed systems couples multi-modal sensing with edge-side near-miss analytics and bidirectional vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and pedestrian-to-everything (P2X) messaging in a single intersection cabinet. This paper presents an integrated framework for VRU protection at signalized intersections, combining LiDAR, radar, RGB camera, and thermal camera at the perception layer, edge-based prediction and surrogate-safety analytics at the computation layer, V2X and P2X messaging at the communication layer, and adaptive signal control at the actuation layer. The framework is grounded in an empirical case study using R-LiViT, the first publicly released roadside LiDAR-Visual-Thermal dataset, which provides 200 multi-modal sequences and 2,400 annotated RGB-T frames at three German intersections. Analysis of 53,319 detection annotations reveals that VRUs comprise approximately 49% of all road-user observations, that day-to-night density drops by 38% for pedestrians and 45% for vehicles while the night distribution shows a higher close-proximity share, that per-frame close-proximity event counts vary approximately 10-fold across the eight unique locations at three intersections, and that 83% of pedestrian bounding boxes are small in image space, indicating that VRUs are typically far from any single sensor. These findings support multi-modal sensing, edge-side analytics, and adaptive context-sensitive deployment rather than uniform single-sensor solutions.
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

DSFNet: Learning Dual-Domain Spectral Operators for Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting in Urban Transportation Systems

Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Forecasting (MoSTF) extends traditional spatio-temporal forecasting by incorporating diverse traffic modalities. Despite significant recent strides in spatio-temporal modeling, existing approaches often fail to explicitly model the coupling relationships between different modality variables. Accurate MoSTF is challenging, as it requires modeling (1) temporal dynamic heterogeneity under exogenous influences and (2) heterogeneous spatial dependencies alongside complex cross-variable couplings. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Domain Spectral Filtering Network (DSFNet). Our framework employs dual-domain spectral filtering to capture heterogeneous spatial patterns and explicitly model the relationships between variables. Unlike graph-based message passing or dense attention over node-modality pairs, DSFNet factorizes space-modality interactions into feature-domain and spatial-domain spectral operators, enabling scalable modeling of nonlocal dependencies and cross-modality couplings. Furthermore, we introduce an external gating mechanism to adaptively regulate temporal dynamics under external influences. We validate our method through extensive experiments on five representative real-world traffic datasets. Compared with the second-best baselines, DSFNet reduces MAE by 3.21%-10.16% across these datasets. The results demonstrate that DSFNet significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy while exhibiting efficiency and robustness.
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

Federated Foundation Models over Vehicular Networks

This paper presents a forward-looking vision for integrating the emerging multi-modal multi-task federated foundation models (M3T FedFMs) into vehicular networks, with the goal of unifying the expressive power of multi-modal multi-task foundation models (M3T FMs) with the privacy-preserving and distributed learning capabilities of federated learning (FL). Given the largely underexplored nature of this research direction, we first introduce the fundamental training/fine-tuning principles of M3T FedFMs. We then discuss a range of their representative use cases in vehicular networks, illustrating the significant potential of M3T FedFMs to enable next-generation vehicular intelligence. Afterwards, we identify key constraints inherent to vehicular environments that challenge the practical deployment of M3T FedFMs, and articulate a set of forward-looking research directions to address these challenges. Furthermore, through a case study conducted on a real-world vehicular dataset (i.e., Waymo Open Dataset), we demonstrate the promise of M3T FedFMs for vehicular networks and release our implementation to facilitate reproducibility and stimulate research in this emerging area (repository: https://github.com/KasraBorazjani/vehicular-fedfm)
Jun 4, 2026cs.MA

A Swarm Approach to Public Transit Using On-demand Routing in a Slime-Mold-Inspired Framework

Demand-responsive transit (DRT) is a flexible alternative to traditional, fixed-route mass-transit networks. Although DRT can function well in low-density communities, high operating costs and low reliability are common issues. We propose that these issues can be mitigated by moving from a centralized, manually-scheduled scheme to a distributed system capable of dynamically routing multiple vehicles using a slime-mold-inspired routing algorithm to maximize network effectiveness. We additionally introduce the method of dynamic transfers to further optimize transit network efficiency. All passenger allocation and dynamic transfers are handled via a continual cooperative bidding process by the buses. In this paper, we present simulated results for a swarm-driven transit network in suburban, urban, and semi-rural scenarios, using map networks pulled from OpenStreetMap. We show that our approach increases passenger delivery rates relative to a fixed-network approach by 28%, 49%, and 101%, respectively, and results in over 75% reduction in walking time in all cases.
Jun 4, 2026quant-ph

Coordinated optimization of departure sequencing and section-track allocation in railway short-term concentrated departure scenarios based on qubo and hybrid quantum algorithms

This study examines the coordinated optimization of departure sequencing and section-track allocation in railway short-term concentrated departure scenarios. A quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) model is formulated to represent departure-position assignment and section-track selection within a unified binary framework. Because the quality of a dispatching scheme depends on time-dependent operational interactions that cannot be fully captured by a static combinatorial model, a simulation-based evaluation layer is introduced to assess section occupation, intermediate-station waiting, platform-capacity pressure, running-time fluctuations, and delay propagation. Within this layered framework, conventional heuristics, quantum-inspired algorithms, and hybrid algorithms are compared on the same decision structure. The results show that the QUBO model can generate feasible candidate schemes after decoding, while the simulation layer clearly differentiates the operational performance of the competing algorithms under both normal and disturbed conditions. In the tested scenarios, QPSO-QAOA performs best under normal conditions, and the quantum-enhanced methods reduce comprehensive cost by 4.28%--26.26% and total delay by 4.37%--24.25% on average under dynamic conditions relative to their conventional counterparts. These findings suggest that the integration of QUBO-based modeling and simulation-based evaluation provides a useful methodological framework for railway short-term concentrated departure scheduling, although validation with real operational data remains necessary.
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

RIDE: An Open Dataset and Benchmark for Train Delay Prediction

Train delay prediction is an important problem for both passengers and railway operators, yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess due to the lack of standardized datasets, prediction targets, and evaluation protocols. To address this gap, we introduce RIDE, an open dataset and benchmark for train delay prediction built at nationwide scale over the Belgian railway network. RIDE covers 94.5M train events, 3.6M journeys, and 35.7M weather records from 2023 to 2025. It is organized as a layered data pipeline from raw railway and weather sources to two public releases: a reusable intermediate relational dataset and model-ready benchmark datasets. The benchmark standardizes the prediction task and the training and testing data. It also provides a unified evaluation protocol that supports direct comparison across models. Using this framework, we provide the first comprehensive comparative evaluation of non-learning, statistical learning, and deep learning models. We show that learning-based methods clearly outperform non-learning models, with graph neural networks achieving the best mean performance, while the strongest learning-based models remain relatively close to one another. Beyond aggregate mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE), the framework also provides breakdowns by prediction horizon and delay change, enabling more detailed analysis of model behavior across forecasting regimes.
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

WHU-Infra3D: A Full-stack Multi-modal Dataset and Benchmark for 3D Roadside Infrastructure Inventory

The paradigm of digital twin cities is shifting from coarse visual mapping toward more precise and actionable digitization of urban assets. However, existing datasets predominantly focus on coarse visual perception, lacking the strict multi-modal alignment and attribute and status diagnosis required for automated infrastructure maintenance. To bridge this gap, we introduce WHU-Infra3D, a large-scale, multi-modal benchmark dataset dedicated to roadside infrastructure inventory. Covering 53.8 km across three cities, WHU-Infra3D uniquely integrates panoramic imagery and LiDAR point clouds with rigorous 2D-3D instance association and cross-frame tracking. Comprising over 175k multi-view 2D bounding boxes alongside thousands of 3D infrastructure instances, the dataset provides over 181k detailed attribute and status annotations (e.g., rust, occlusion) to empower operational health assessment. We establish comprehensive baselines across five core tasks: 2D detection, 2D cross-view matching, 3D geo-identification, 3D point cloud segmentation, and attribute recognition. Extensive evaluations expose significant cross-city domain gaps and inherent vulnerabilities of current models on long-tailed defective statuses, establishing WHU-Infra3D as an essential testbed for advancing scalable, AI-driven urban infrastructure inventory and lifecycle management. The WHU-Infra3D dataset is available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/WHU-Infra3D.
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Smart Transportation Without Neurons -- Fair Metro Network Expansion with Tabular Reinforcement Learning

We tackle the Metro Network Expansion Problem (MNEP), a subset of the Transport Network Design Problem (TNDP), which focuses on expanding metro systems to satisfy travel demand. Traditional methods rely on exact and heuristic approaches that require expert-defined constraints to reduce the search space. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) has emerged due to its effectiveness in complex sequential decision-making processes-it remains, however, computationally expensive, environmentally costly, and requires additional engineering to interpret. We show that MNEP problems are small enough to not require Deep RL methods. Reformulating the MNEP as a Non-Markovian Rewards Decision Process (NMRDP), we use tabular RL to achieve similar performance with significantly fewer training episodes, additionally offering greater interpretability. Additionally, we incorporate social equity criteria into the reward functions, focusing on efficiency and fairness, highlighting the versatility of our method. Evaluated in real-world settings-Xi'an and Amsterdam-our method reduces total episodes by a factor of 18 and total carbon emissions by a factor of 12 on average, while remaining competitive with Deep RL. This approach offers a replicable, modular, interpretable, and resource-efficient solution with potential applications to other combinatorial optimization problems.
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

Calibrating Urban Traffic Simulation from Sparse Road Observations via Genetic Optimization

Urban traffic simulation is a critical tool for infrastructure planning, including the placement of electric vehicle charging stations. However, realistic traffic simulation across many cities is hindered by two fundamental data limitations: detailed real-world traffic measurements are available for only a small fraction of road segments in most cities, and employment distribution data critical for modeling commuter traffic is rarely available at the resolution needed for simulation. This paper presents a genetic algorithm-based framework that directly addresses both limitations, calibrating urban traffic simulations from sparse road observations without requiring detailed job location data. Using the SUMO traffic simulation platform for Greensboro, North Carolina, our approach optimizes job distributions and gate-traffic parameters to align simulated traffic with a small sample of roads with known traffic-flow rates. We demonstrate that this approach produces simulated traffic that correlates well with real-world measurements, generalizes to road segments withheld from training, and produces job distributions that show promising qualitative agreement with census employment data despite never directly training on that employment data. This work demonstrates that realistic urban traffic simulation can be achieved from minimal real-world observations, offering a scalable and data-light approach to simulation calibration that reduces the barrier to deploying traffic models across diverse cities.
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

PatchSTG: Scalable Spatiotemporal Graph Transformers for Traffic Forecasting on Irregular Sensor Networks

Traffic forecasting is a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems, yet remains challenging in real-world settings due to irregular sensor distributions and the high computational cost of modeling large-scale spatiotemporal dependencies. In practical traffic networks, sensors are unevenly distributed across regions, leading to non-uniform spatial structures that limit the effectiveness and scalability of existing graph-based and attention-based models. To address these challenges, we propose PatchSTG, a patch-based spatiotemporal graph Transformer designed for efficient forecasting on irregular sensor networks. The key idea is to introduce a hierarchical spatial representation that partitions sensors into balanced, locality-preserving patches based on geographic information. On top of this structure, a dual attention encoder alternates between intra-patch attention for capturing local interactions and inter-patch attention for modeling global dependencies, reducing computational complexity from quadratic to near-linear scaling. We evaluate PatchSTG on real-world traffic data from Rhode Island and additional large-scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves stable and competitive forecasting performance across multiple horizons, while significantly improving computational efficiency. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of spatial partitioning and dual attention in capturing both local and long-range traffic dynamics. These results suggest that patch-based spatiotemporal modeling provides a scalable and effective framework for traffic forecasting under irregular spatial settings.
Jun 1, 2026cs.MA

A Game-Theoretic Decision Framework for Optimal Selection of Coordination Detection Methods in Multi-UAV Fleet Operations

Detecting coordination among unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleets operating in shared airspace and identifying the route-lead aircraft whose navigation decisions govern fleet behavior presents a fundamental speed--accuracy trade-off: fast methods enable real-time traffic management but sacrifice detection fidelity, while accurate methods may exceed the time budget for actionable airspace deconfliction. This paper presents a game-theoretic decision framework that resolves this trade-off by formulating method selection as a two-player zero-sum game between a Monitor (selecting computational methods and parameters) and Nature (selecting the unknown traffic scenario). We construct an end-to-end pipeline from trajectory surveillance data through eight candidate detection algorithms, a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis characterizing their stochastic performance, and finally a multi-objective optimization layer that identifies Pareto-optimal method portfolios. The minimax solution provides a robust mixed strategy with a probability distribution over methods that guarantees worst-case performance regardless of scenario uncertainty. Experimental evaluation across 200 randomized configurations spanning 5--50 aircraft demonstrates that the framework recommends distinct method portfolios depending on operational priority: Koopman Phase dominates balanced (70.6%) and speed-priority (79.7%) profiles, while CRQA emerges as primary (47.4%) when route-lead identification is prioritized. The framework achieves a guaranteed game value of 0.29--0.53 (normalized utility) across all tested preference profiles, providing the first principled, scenario-adaptive methodology for computational method selection in UTM fleet monitoring operations.
Jun 1, 2026cs.AI

TrafficRAG: A Multimodal RAG Framework for Traffic Accident Liability Determination

Traffic accident liability analysis is a critical yet challenging task in intelligent transportation and legal assistance. Existing methods often suffer from low efficiency, subjective judgment, and inconsistent analysis results. Meanwhile, large language models are constrained by noisy video inputs and insufficient legal domain knowledge. To address these issues, this work presents TrafficRAG, a multimodal retrieval-augmented framework for automated traffic accident analysis and report generation. Specifically, the proposed framework first adopts a vision-language model to produce structured textual descriptions of accident scenarios, which serve as accurate retrieval queries. Based on these textual queries, a hybrid retrieval strategy integrating BM25 sparse retrieval and dense embedding retrieval is employed to fetch relevant traffic regulations and similar historical cases. Finally, the large language model incorporates retrieved legal knowledge and multimodal accident evidence for comprehensive reasoning, and generates standardized, legally grounded liability analysis reports. Extensive experiments show that TrafficRAG consistently outperforms baseline methods, achieving 77.32% Legal Norm Adaptation Accuracy, 81.71% Factual Faithfulness, and a Liability Ratio MAE of 5.48%. The results validate that integrating multimodal factual evidence with legal clauses via retrieval augmentation can effectively improve the reliability and accuracy of traffic accident liability determination.
May 31, 2026eess.SY

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.
May 31, 2026cs.CY

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.
May 31, 2026cs.AI

Large Language Models in Transportation Systems Management and Operations: From Text Reasoning to Multi-modal Decision Support

Transportation systems management and operations (TSMO) increasingly depends on timely interpretation of heterogeneous data, from various sensor streams, incident reports, traveler feedback, and visual observations. Large language models (LLMs), including emerging multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs), provide a new mechanism for integrating these structured and unstructured inputs into operator-facing decision support. This survey paper reviews LLM- and MM-LLM-based applications in TSMO across three domains: transportation operations & services (supply), mobility & fleet services (demand), and data, modeling & decision support. Using a PRISMA-guided screening process, we synthesize current studies while distinguishing operationally oriented applications from prototype and emerging concepts. We further identify recurring challenges in data heterogeneity, real-time inference, explainability, multi-modal fusion, and governance. Finally, we outline existing gaps and future directions in localized adaptation, edge deployment, benchmarking, and cross-agency collaboration. Overall, LLM-based systems appear most promising as a decision-support layer, with MM-LLMs offering particular value when heterogeneous text, visual, and sensor inputs must be integrated.
May 30, 2026cs.LG

Spatiotemporal Multi-Task Graph Transformer for Trip-Level Transit Prediction

Passenger count data from public transit systems reveals urban mobility patterns and is essential for planning, operation, and optimisation. However, non-linear spatiotemporal interdependencies across stops and lines make modelling and prediction challenging. Existing approaches often rely on fixed temporal, spatial, or stop-level formulations, limiting their ability to capture within-trip evolution and network context. This study proposes SMT-GraphFormer, a spatiotemporal multi-task graph transformer that frames trip-level transit prediction as sequence-to-sequence modelling. Given a line's stop sequence and trip-level context, the model predicts successive boarding and alighting counts, with delay and dwell time treated as encoder-side surrogate tasks. Key components include graph embeddings for multi-relational stop similarity, a context encoder for weather and temporal information, and a multi-gate mixture-of-experts module that produces task-specific decoder representations for boarding and alighting predictions. Evaluation on public bus transit data from Trondheim, Norway, shows that SMT-GraphFormer outperforms stop-level tabular benchmarks, with ablation studies examining each component's contribution. The sequential formulation yields substantial gains on alighting prediction (++0.24 in R2R^2) and consistent improvements on boarding, delay, and dwell, confirming the value of explicit trip-level sequential bias and inter-target dependencies. These findings demonstrate the potential of transformer-based sequence modelling for capturing complex spatiotemporal dynamics in public transit and underscore the value of architectures tailored to transit data rather than off-the-shelf tabular models. The proposed framework provides a horizon-agnostic basis for scenario analysis in digital twin environments, supporting informed decision-making by planners and transit operators.
May 28, 2026cs.MA

MATraM: A Multi-Activity Transport and Mobility Agent-Based Model for Activity Modifications

This paper introduces the Multi-Activity Transport & Mobility (MATraM) Agent-Based Model (ABM), a novel framework designed to advance activity-based transport modelling by incorporating dynamic activity adaptation. Traditional transport models simulate system performance using varying levels of abstraction, including flow-based, queue-based, and interaction-based mobility representations. While these approaches differ in their treatment of movement and congestion, they typically rely on pre-defined trip patterns that limit responsiveness to changing conditions. In particular, conventional activity-based models generate trips from fixed daily schedules, constraining their ability to capture behavioural flexibility and uncertainty. MATraM addresses this limitation by enabling agents to flag activities modification requests in response to sub-optimal travel conditions, such as increased travel times. By coupling with an activity scheduling and modification framework, the model integrates adaptive decision-making into the generation and execution of daily activity schedules. This allows for a more realistic representation of how individuals adjust their behaviour in response to transport system dynamics, leading to emergent mobility and congestion patterns. The ABM is presented following the ODD protocol, outlining its purpose, structure, and implementation. MATraM includes detailed representations of agents, their activity schedules, and the transport network, alongside submodels governing routing, scheduling, and behavioural adaptation. By bridging activity-based modelling with interaction-based mobility simulation, MATraM provides a flexible and extensible platform for exploring transport dynamics under uncertainty. This work contributes to the development of next-generation transport models capable of capturing the complex interplay between individual behaviour and system-level outcomes.
May 28, 2026cs.AI

From GPS Points to Travel Patterns: Flexible and Semantic Trajectory Generation with LLMs

Urban trajectories play a crucial role in modeling urban dynamics and supporting various smart city applications. However, privacy concerns restrict access to large-scale and high-quality trajectory datasets. Trajectory generation provides a promising alternative by synthesizing realistic data to mitigate privacy risks. However, existing methods fail to explicitly capture travel patterns and can only generate fixed-length trajectories under a single condition. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{HTP}, which \textbf{H}ierarchically generates \textbf{T}ravel patterns first and then generates GPS \textbf{P}oints by using large language models (LLMs), rather than directly generating GPS points. We first design a trajectory-specific residual quantization variational autoencoder (RQ-VAE) that quantizes micro-level GPS trajectories into compact, macro-level travel pattern tokens in a coarse-to-fine manner. These tokens capture rich segment spatial irregularities, such as point density variations caused by traffic conditions. Then, we extend the LLM vocabulary with travel pattern tokens to align trajectory representations with the LLM input, and apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align the LLM with the trajectory generation task, enabling generation of travel pattern sequences under various conditions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that HTP outperforms the strongest baseline by an average of 29.78% in terms of generation quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/slzhou-xy/HTP.
May 28, 2026cs.AI

From XXLTraffic to EvoXXLTraffic: Scaling Traffic Forecasting to Sensor-Evolving Networks

Existing traffic forecasting benchmarks assume a fixed sensor set, but real road-sensor networks grow continuously as the road network changes year by year. We introduce the XXLTraffic dataset family, which spans up to 27 years of California PeMS and Transport for NSW data. The fixed-sensor subsets of XXLTraffic support extremely long forecasting with multi-year gaps and standard hourly / daily long-horizon forecasting. We extend it to EvoXXLTraffic, a sensor-evolving reorganization that exposes per-year active sensors, yearly traffic-flow matrices, and yearly graph snapshots across nine PeMS districts, with growth ratios ranging from +305% to over +10,000%. We define a yearly streaming forecasting protocol on EvoXXLTraffic in which each calendar year is a continual task, and benchmark a wide range of representative baselines drawn from static spatio-temporal GNNs, naïve online schemes, evolving-graph continual methods, and retrieval / test-time methods. We find that our ultra-large evolutionary dataset better reflects the real world, and many state-of-the-art (SOTA) results no longer work. Our dataset complements existing benchmarks by enabling more realistic forecasting under ultra-long evolutionary road networks. Our code and baselines are available at github repo: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/TSAS26-EvoXXLTraffic
May 28, 2026cs.LG

Momentum Based Reward Design for Low Emission Traffic Signal Control

Urban traffic congestion is a growing global issue contributing significantly to long commute times and environmental pollution. Traditional traffic signal control systems often fail to adapt to dynamic traffic conditions. Adaptive traffic signal control can improve urban traffic without changing road infrastructure. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown strong performance for this task, but existing delay and queue-based rewards often produce short-sighted or unstable policies. This paper proposes a Momentum-Based Reward Function (MBRF) that encourages vehicles to keep moving rather than penalizing congestion alone. The method is evaluated in SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) using standard traffic metrics such as waiting time, queue length, throughput, and CO2 emissions. Results show that the proposed reward produces better throughput-emission trade-offs and more stable learning behavior than delay or queue-based rewards, as well as classical controllers such as Max Pressure and LQF.
May 28, 2026cs.LG

SCOPE: A Lightweight-training LLM Framework for Air Traffic Control Readback Monitoring

Pilot readback of Air Traffic Control (ATC) voice instructions is a primary safeguard against miscommunication in air transportation. However, readback anomalies remain implicated in approximately 80% of aviation incidents. This vulnerability is further exacerbated by rising traffic volume and elevated cognitive workload, thereby motivating automated readback monitoring by machine. Traditional rule-based and machine learning approaches struggle to generalize across the highly variable and evolving phraseology of air traffic controller-pilot communications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened a new avenue through their strong reasoning and generalization capabilities, existing approaches still face deployment and computational barriers in practice. In this work, we propose Semantic reasoning for Communication via Open-set Plug-in with Examples (SCOPE), a novel lightweight-training LLM framework that advances both the efficiency and accuracy of machine-based ATC readback monitoring. The core idea is to couple a plug-in open-set classifier with a carefully designed in-context learning mechanism on top of a frozen LLM. Extensive experiments on the semi-synthetic communication dataset show that SCOPE attains superior accuracy while delivering the low-latency response required for operational environments. Under a few-shot setting, SCOPE achieves 91.05% accuracy in open-set detection and corrects 96.63% of anomalous readbacks, thereby outperforming the strongest available baselines while providing explanations for its decisions. These findings demonstrate the potential of our framework as a practical pathway toward interpretable and controllable ATC readback monitoring.
May 28, 2026cs.NI

Network Optimization Aspects of Autonomous Vehicles: Challenges and Future Directions

Global megatrends, such as urbanization, population growth, and emerging network solutions are accelerating the development of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) industry. There are many truths, some misconceptions, and even some excitement about CAVs in the public's opinion. The main objective of the current article is to provide a comprehensive review, eliminate misconceptions, and outline the future of the network optimization aspects of autonomous vehicles by presenting various multidisciplinary methods, such as cooperative perception. Given our extensive experience with CAVs, we are aiming to share some of the insights and knowledge we have gained, along with relevant use-cases and experiment results.
May 28, 2026cs.AI

ReasonLight: A Multimodal Foundation Model-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Traffic Signal Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in traffic signal control (TSC). However, its reliance on predefined states limits responsiveness to observable open-world events that are absent from training data. IoT-enabled intersections provide heterogeneous observations from roadside sensors and cameras, creating opportunities to improve RL adaptability to such events. To this end, we propose ReasonLight, a multimodal foundation model-enhanced RL framework for zero-shot TSC. ReasonLight integrates three sources of information: structured traffic measurements, multi-view camera observations, and candidate phase decisions from a pre-trained RL controller. Given an RL-proposed phase, ReasonLight extracts visual semantics from multi-view images and aligns them with compact sensor-derived scene descriptions. This alignment enables a semantic-guided refinement module to either preserve or adjust the proposed action according to traffic rules and event semantics. To ensure operational reliability, refined actions are constrained by the set of available phases. Any invalid decision is rejected, and the system falls back to the original RL action. We evaluate ReasonLight on two types of rare events not seen during RL training: emergency vehicle priority and temporary traffic regulation. Experimental results show that ReasonLight achieves zero-shot adaptation without retraining. It reduces emergency vehicle waiting time by up to 88.7% compared with the RL-only backbone while preserving comparable routine traffic performance.