Abstract
In a time of economic austerity, more pressure is being put on the existing transport systems to be more sustainable and, at the same time, more equitable and socially inclusive. Regular public road transportation traditionally uses fixed routes and schedules, which can be extremely expensive in rural areas and certain periods of the day in urban areas due to low and unpredictable demand. Demand Responsive Transportation systems are a kind of hybrid transportation approach between a taxi and a bus that try to address these problems with routes and frequencies that may vary according to the actual observed demand. Demand Responsive Transportation seems to have potential to answer the sustainability and social inclusion challenges in a context of austerity. However, DRT projects may fail: it is not only important to solve the underlying model in an efficient way, but also to understand how different ways of operating the service affect customers and operators. To help design DRT services, we developed an innovative approach integrating simulation and optimization. Using this simulator, we compared a real night-time bus service in the city of Porto, Portugal, with a hypothetical flexible DRT service for the same scenario.

Abstract

Abstract
Providing quality public transportation can be extremely expensive when demand is low, variable and unpredictable. Demand Responsive Transportation (DRT) systems try to address these issues with routes and frequencies that may vary according to observed demand. The design and operation of DRTs involve multiple criteria and have a combinatorial nature that prevents the use of traditional optimization methods. We have developed an innovative Decision Support System (DSS) integrating simulation and optimization, to help design and operate DRT services, minimizing operating costs and maximizing the service quality. Experiments inspired in real problems have shown the potential of this DSS. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.

Abstract
Simulation modeling is a well-known and recurrent approach to study the performance of urban systems. Taking into account the recent and continuous transformations within increasingly complex and multidimensional cities, the use of simulation tools is, in many cases, the only feasible and reliable approach to analyze such dynamic systems. However, simulation models can become very time consuming when detailed input-space exploration is needed. To tackle this problem, simulation metamodels are often used to approximate the simulators' results. In this paper, we propose an active learning algorithm based on the Gaussian process (CP) framework that gathers the most informative simulation data points in batches, according to both their predictive variances and to the relative distance between them. This allows us to explore the simulators' input space with fewer data points and in parallel, and thus in a more efficient way, while avoiding computationally expensive simulation runs in the process. We take advantage of the closeness notion encoded into the GP to select batches of points in such a way that they do not belong to the same highvariance neighborhoods. In addition, we also suggest two simple and practical user-defined stopping criteria so that the iterative learning procedure can be fully automated. We illustrate this methodology using three experimental settings. The results show that the proposed methodology is able to improve the exploration efficiency of the simulation input space in comparison with non-restricted batch-mode active learning procedures.

Abstract
Points of Interest (POI) are widely used in many applications nowadays mainly due to the increasing amount of related data available online, notably from volunteered geographic information (VGI) sources. Being able to connect these data from different sources is useful for many things like validating, correcting and also removing duplicated data in a database. However, there is no standard way to identify the same POIs across different sources and doing it manually could be very expensive. Therefore, automatic POI matching has been an attractive research topic. In our work, we propose a novel data-driven machine learning approach based on an outlier detection algorithm to match POIs automatically. Surprisingly, works that have been presented so far do not use data-driven machine learning approaches. The reason for this might be that such approaches need a training dataset to be constructed by manually matching some POIs. To mitigate this, we have taken advantage of the Crosswalk API, available at the time we started our project, which allowed us to retrieve already matched POI data from different sources in US territory. We trained and tested our model with a dataset containing Factual, Facebook and Foursquare POIs from New York City and were able to successfully apply it to another dataset of Facebook and Foursquare POIs from Porto, Portugal, finding matches with an accuracy around 95%. These are encouraging results that confirm our approach as an effective way to address the problem of automatically matching POIs. They also show that such a model can be trained with data available from multiple sources and be applied to other datasets with different locations from those used in training. Furthermore, as a data-driven machine learning approach, the model can be continuously improved by adding new validated data to its training dataset. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.

Abstract
Demand for leisure activities has increased due to some reasons such as increasing wealth, ageing populations and changing lifestyles, however, the efficiency of public transport system relies on solid demand levels and well-established mobility patterns and, so, providing quality public transportation is extremely expensive in low, variable and unpredictable demand scenarios, as it is the case of non-routine trips. Better prediction estimations about the trip purpose helps to anticipate the transport demand and consequently improve its planning. This paper addresses the contribution in comparing the traditional approach of considering municipality division to study such trips against a proposed approach based on clustering of dense concentration of services in the urban space. In our case, POIs (Points of Interest) collected from social networks (e.g. Foursquare) represent these services. These trips were associated with the territory using two different approaches: 'municipalities' and 'clusters' and then related with the likelihood of choosing a POI category (Points-of-Interest). The results obtained for both geographical approaches are then compared considering a multinomial model to check for differences in destination choice. The variables of distance travelled, travel time and whether the trip was made on a weekday or a weekend had a significant contribution in the choice of destination using municipalities approach. Using clusters approach, the results are similar but the accuracy is improved and due to more significant results to more categories of destinations, more conclusions can be drawn. These results lead us to believe that a cluster-based analysis using georeferenced data from social media can contribute significantly better than a territorial-based analysis to the study of non-routine mobility. We also contribute to the knowledge of patterns of this type of travel, a type of trips that is still poorly valued and difficult to study. Nevertheless, it would be worth a more extensive analysis, such as analysing more variables or even during a larger period.