A Data-Driven Scalable Method for Profiling and Dynamic Analysis of Shared Mobility Solutions

Abstract

The advent of Internet of Things will revolutionise the sharing mobility by enabling high connectivity between passengers and means of transport. This generates enormous quantity of data which can reveal valuable knowledge and help understand complex travel behaviour. At the same time, it challenges analytics platforms to discover knowledge from data in motion (i.e., the analytics occur in real time as the event happens), extract travel habits, and provide reliable and faster sharing mobility services in dynamic contexts. In this paper, a scalable method for dynamic profiling is introduced, which allows the extraction of users’ travel behaviour and valuable knowledge about visited locations, using only geolocation data collected from mobile devices. The methodology makes use of a compact representation of time-evolving graphs that can be used to analyse complex data in motion. In particular, we demonstrate that using a combination of state-of-the-art technologies from data science domain coupled with methodologies from the transportation domain, it is possible to implement, with the minimum of resources, the next generation of autonomous sharing mobility services (i.e., long-term and on-demand parking sharing and combinations of car sharing and ride sharing) and extract from raw data, without any user input and in near real time, valuable knowledge (i.e., location labelling and activity classification).