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Browsing by Author "Ashqar, Huthaifa Issam"

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    Strategic Design of Smart Bike-Sharing Systems for Smart Cities
    Ashqar, Huthaifa Issam (Virginia Tech, 2018-10-25)
    Traffic congestion has become one of the major challenging problems of modern life in many urban areas. This growing problem leads to negative environmental impacts, wasted fuel, lost productivity, and increased travel time. In big cities, trains and buses bring riders to transit stations near shopping and employment centers, but riders then need another transportation mode to reach their final destination, which is known as the last mile problem. A smart bike-sharing system (BSS) can help address this problem and encourage more people to ride public transportation, thus relieving traffic congestion. At the strategic level, we start with proposing a novel two-layer hierarchical classifier that increases the accuracy of traditional transportation mode classification algorithms. In the transportation sector, researchers can use smartphones to track and obtain information of multi-mode trips. These data can be used to recognize the user's transportation mode, which can be then utilized in several different applications; such as planning new BSS instead of using costly surveys. Next, a new method is proposed to quantify the effect of several factors such as weather conditions on the prediction of bike counts at each station. The proposed approach is promising to quantify the effect of various features on BSSs in cases of large networks with big data. Third, these resulted significant features were used to develop state-of-the-art toolbox algorithms to operate BSSs efficiently at two levels: network and station. Finally, we proposed a quality-of-service (QoS) measurement, namely Optimal Occupancy, which considers the impact of inhomogeneity in a BSS. We used one of toolbox algorithms modeled earlier to estimate the proposed QoS. Results revealed that the Optimal Occupancy is beneficial and outperforms the traditionally-known QoS measurement.