Human Mobility Prediction and Unobstructed Route Planning in Public Transport Networks

With the increasing availability of human-tracking data (e.g., public transport IC card data, trajectory data, etc.), human mobility prediction is increasingly important. In this paper, we study a novel problem of using human-tracking data to predict human mobility and to detect over-crowded stations in public transport networks, and then finding unobstructed routes to go around these over-crowded stations. We believe that this study can bring significant benefits to users in many popular mobile applications such as route planning and recommendation, urban computing, and location based services in general. This problem is challenged by two difficulties: (1) how to detect crowded stations effectively, and (2) how to find unobstructed routes in public transport networks efficiently. To overcome these difficulties, we propose three human-mobility prediction methods based on uniform distribution, standard normal distribution, and priority ranking, respectively, to predict human mobility and to detect over-crowded stations. Then, we develop an efficient algorithm based on network expansion to find unobstructed routes in public transport networks. The performance of the developed algorithms has been verified by extensive experiments.