Abstract
This paper presents an interactive game designed to improve users’ experience related to driving behaviour, as well as to provide decision support in this context. This paper explores machine learning (ML) methods to enhance the decision-making and automation in a gaming environment. It examines various ML strategies, including supervised, unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning (RL), emphasizing RL’s effectiveness in interactive environments and its combination with Deep Learning, culminating in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for intricate decision-making processes. By leveraging these concepts, a practical application considering a gaming scenario is presented, which replicates vehicle behaviour simulations from real-world driving scenarios. Ultimately, the objective of this research is to contribute to the ML and artificial intelligence (AI) fields by introducing methods that could transform the way player agents adapt and interact with the environment and other agents decisions, leading to more authentic and fluid gaming experiences. Additionally, by considering recreational and serious games as case studies, this work aims to demonstrate the versatility of these methods, providing a rich, dynamic environment for testing the adaptability and responsiveness, while can also offer a context for applying these advancements to simulate and solve real-world problems in the complex and dynamic domain of mobility. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract

Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are versatile platforms for carrying communications nodes such as Wi-Fi Access Points and cellular Base Stations. Flying Networks (FNs) offer on-demand wireless connectivity where terrestrial networks are impractical or unsustainable. However, managing communications resources in FNs presents challenges, particularly in optimizing UAV placement to maximize Quality of Service (QoS) for Ground Users (GUs) while minimizing energy consumption, given the UAVs' limited battery life. Existing multi-UAV placement solutions primarily focus on maximizing coverage areas, assuming static UAV positions and uniform GU distribution, overlooking energy efficiency and heterogeneous QoS requirements. We propose the Sustainable multi-UAV Performance-aware Placement (SUPPLY) algorithm, which defines and optimizes UAV trajectories to reduce energy consumption while ensuring QoS based on Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) in the links with GUs. Additionally, we introduce the Multi-UAV Energy Consumption (MUAVE) simulator to evaluate energy consumption. Using both MUAVE and ns-3 simulators, we evaluate SUPPLY in typical and random networking scenarios, focusing on energy consumption and network performance. Results show that SUPPLY reduces energy consumption by up to 25% with minimal impact on throughput and delay.

Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now ubiquitous in daily life, significantly impacting society by supporting decision-making. However, in many application areas, understanding the rationale behind AI decisions is crucial, highlighting the need for explainable AI (XAI). AI algorithms often lack transparency, making it hard to understand their inner workings. This work presents an overview of XAI solutions for decision support in mobility context. It addresses the complexity of explaining decision support models by offering explanations in various formats tailored to different user profiles. By integrating language models, XAI models may generate texts with varying technical detail levels, aiding ethical AI deployment and bridging the gap between complex models and human interpretability. This work explores the need for flexible explanation formats, supporting varied user profiles with graphical, textual, and tabular explanations. By integrating natural language processing models personalized explanations that are accurate, understandable, and accessible to a diverse audience can be generated. This study ultimately aims to support the task of making XAI robust and user-friendly, boosting its widespread use and application. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
Subgroup discovery (SD) aims at finding significant subgroups of a given population of individuals characterized by statistically unusual properties of interest. SD on event logs provides insight into particular behaviors of processes, which may be a valuable complement to the traditional process analysis techniques, especially for low -structured processes. This paper proposes a scalable and efficient method to search significant SD rules on frequent sequences of events, exploiting their multidimensional nature. With this method, it is intended to identify significant subsequences of events where the distribution of values of some target aspect is significantly different than the same distribution for the entire event log. A publicly available real -life event log of a Dutch hospital is used as a running example to demonstrate the applicability of our method. The proposed approach was applied on a real -life case study based on the public transport of a medium size European city (Porto, Portugal), for which the event data consists of 133 million smartcard travel validations from buses, trams and trains. The results include a characterization of mobility flows over multiple aspects, as well as the identification of unexpected behaviors in the flow of commuters (public transport). The generated knowledge provided a useful insight into the behavior of travelers, which can be applied at operational, tactical and strategic business levels, enhancing the current view of the transport services to transport authorities and operators.

Abstract
Similar to software systems, programming languages evolve substantially over time. Indeed, the community has more recently seen the release of new versions of mainstream languages in shorter and shorter time frames. For instance, the C++ working group has begun to release a new version of the language every 3 years, which now has a greater number of modern C++ features and improvements in modern standards (C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++ 20). Nonetheless, there is little empirical evidence on how developers are transitioning to use modern C++ constructs in legacy systems, and not understanding the trends and reasons for adopting these new modern C++ features might hinder software developers in conducting rejuvenation efforts. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study to understand the development practices of KDE contributors to evolve their projects toward the use of modern C++ features. Our results show a trend in the widespread adoption of some modern C++ features (lambda expressions, auto-typed variables, and range-based for) in KDE community projects. We also found that developers in the KDE community are making large efforts to modernize their programs using automated tools, and we present some modernization scenarios and the benefits of adopting modern C++ features of the C++ programming language. Our results might help C++ software developers, in general, to evolve C++ legacy systems and tools builders to implement more effective tools that could help in rejuvenation efforts.