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As auto-dependent development has forced the urban limits of the city to sprawl, it has put considerable pressure on the transportation corridors that serve the city center. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, this condition is exacerbated by the downtown being bounded by water on three sides. Thus, there are a limited number of transportation corridors onto and off of the peninsula. This thesis examines how transit stations for a proposed public transportation line, within an underused rail corridor, can actively support and engage the communities they serve. A personal rapid transit network is proposed as a mobility-on-demand public transit system within this corridor. This introduction of a new transportation strategy is seen as a paradigm shift for the way transportation is conceived of in Halifax. Thus, the typology of the station will be studied in three different social and topographic environments, to form prototypes for the potential of transit stations throughout Halifax.

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) benefit from both connectivity between vehicles and city infrastructures and automation of vehicles. In this respect, CAVs can improve safety and reduce traffic congestion and environmental impacts of daily commutes through making collaborative decisions. This dissertation studies how to reduce the energy consumption of vehicles and traffic congestion by making high-level routing decisions of CAVs. The first half of this dissertation considers the problem of eco-routing (finding the energy-optimal route) for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) to minimize the overall energy consumption cost. Several algorithms are proposed that can simultaneously calculate an energy-optimal route (eco-route) for a PHEV and an optimal power-train control strategy over this route. The results show significant energy savings for PHEVs with a near real-time execution time for the algorithms. The second half of this dissertation tackles the problem of routing for fleets of CAVs in the presence of mixed traffic (coexistence of regular vehicles and CAVs). In this setting, all CAVs belong to the same fleet and can be routed using a centralized controller. The routing objective is to minimize a given overall fleet traveling cost (travel time or energy consumption). It is assumed that regular vehicles (non-CAVs) choose their routing decisions selfishly to minimize their traveling time. A framework is proposed that deals with the routing interaction between CAVs and regular uncontrolled vehicles under different penetration rates (fractions) of CAVs. The results suggest collaborative routing decisions of CAVs improve not only the cost of CAVs but also that of the non-CAVs. This framework is further extended to consider congestion-aware route-planning policies for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, whereby a fleet of autonomous vehicles provides on-demand mobility under mixed traffic conditions. A network flow model is devised to optimize the AMoD routing and rebalancing strategies in a congestion-aware fashion by accounting for the endogenous impact of AMoD flows on travel time. The results suggest that for high levels of demand, pure AMoD travel can be detrimental due to the additional traffic stemming from its rebalancing flows, while the combination of AMoD with walking or micromobility options can significantly improve the overall system performance.

While the traditional approach to ease traffic congestion has focused on building infrastructure, the recent emergence of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and urban mobility services (e.g., Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems) has opened a new set of alternatives for reducing travel times. This thesis seeks to exploit these advances to improve the operation and efficiency of Intelligent Transportation Systems using a network optimization perspective. It proposes novel methods to evaluate the prospective benefits of adopting socially optimal routing schemes, intermodal mobility, and contraflow lane reversals in transportation networks. This dissertation makes methodological and empirical contributions to the transportation domain. From a methodological standpoint, it devises a fast solver for the Traffic Assignment Problem with Side Constraints which supports arbitrary linear constraints on the flows. Instead of using standard column-generation methods, it introduces affine approximations of the travel latency function to reformulate the problem as a quadratic (or linear) programming problem. This framework is applied to two problems related to urban planning and mobility policy: social routing with rebalancing in intermodal mobility systems and planning lane reversals in transportation networks. Moreover, it proposes a novel method to jointly estimate the Origin-Destination demand and travel latency functions of the Traffic Assignment Problem. Finally, it develops a model to jointly optimize the pricing, rebalancing and fleet sizing decisions of a Mobility-on-Demand service. Empirically, it validates all the methods by testing them with real transportation topologies and real traffic data from Eastern Massachusetts and New York City showing the achievable benefits obtained when compared to benchmarks.

In recent years, the paradigm of personal urban mobility has radically evolved as an increasing number of Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) systems continue to revolutionize urban transportation. Hailed as the future of sustainable transportation, with significant implications on urban planning, these systems typically utilize a fleet of shared vehicles such as bikes, electric scooters, cars, etc., and provide a centralized matching platform to deliver point-to-point mobility to passengers. In this dissertation, we study MoD systems along three operational directions – (1) modeling: developing analytical models that capture the rich stochasticity of passenger demand and its impact on the fleet distribution, (2) economics: devising strategies to maximize revenue, and (3) control: developing coordination mechanisms aimed at optimizing platform throughput. First, we focus on the metropolitan bike-sharing systems where platforms typically do not have access to real-time location data to ascertain the exact spatial distribution of their fleet. We formulate the problem of accurately predicting the fleet distribution as a Markov Chain monitoring problem on a graph representation of a city. Specifically, each monitor provides information on the exact number of bikes transitioning to a specific node or traversing a specific edge at a particular time. Under budget constraints on the number of such monitors, we design efficient algorithms to determine appropriate monitoring operations and demonstrate their efficacy over synthetic and real datasets. Second, we focus on the revenue maximization strategies for individual strategic driving partners on ride-hailing platforms. Under the key assumption that large-scale platform dynamics are agnostic to the actions of an individual strategic driver, we propose a series of dynamic programming-based algorithms to devise contingency plans that maximize the expected earnings of a driver. Using robust optimization techniques, we rigorously reason about and analyze the sensitivity of such strategies to perturbations in passenger demand distributions. Finally, we address the problem of large-scale fleet management. Recent approaches for the fleet management problem have leveraged model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithms to tackle complex decision-making problems. However, such methods suffer from a lack of explainability and often fail to generalize well. We consider an explicit need-based coordination mechanism to propose a non-deep RL-based algorithm that augments tabular Q-learning with a combinatorial optimization problem. Empirically, a case study on the New York City taxi demand enables a rigorous assessment of the value, robustness, and generalizability of the proposed approaches.

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, industrial development and population growth drive the expansion of urban space, urban transportation demand shows the characteristics of spatial decentralization and diversification, and transportation travelers' requirements for mobility, accessibility, and comfort of transportation travel services are enhanced. Mobility on demand (MoD) services such as DiDi and Uber are new modes of public transportation, bringing many new opportunities and challenges. MoD travel services, shared bicycles, and other complementary public transport modes are rapidly developing in the "Internet +" environment, serving the "one mile" before and after the residents' travel. MoD technologies play an important role as a feeder to the main public transportation lines, helping to increase public transportation patronage and improve the speed of travel for residents. In this context, the study aims to develop a multi-modal public transportation system network design methodology to provide better operational coordination between different modes of transportation and to provide faster travel services. In order to promote better coordination between different transportation modes and to provide theoretical and methodological support for the development of a multi-modal public transportation system network design system, a bi-level planning model for this problem is first constructed. The upper-level planning model is used to minimize the total travel time and cost of passengers and the economic cost of public transportation operators, and to decide which bus lines to operate, the structure of bus lines, and the frequency of operating bus lines; the lower-level operating model is used to assign passengers to make travel mode choices and to carry out traffic distribution of the public transportation network based on the minimum number of interchanges. Then, based on this bi-level planning model, an improved genetic algorithm is developed to solve the upper-level public transportation network planning problem, in which the algorithm for passenger flow allocation in the lower-level planning model is nested in the genetic algorithm.  Finally, the developed methodology is validated for the benchmark Mandl network design by comparing with the traditional public transportation network. The results show that the multi-modal public transportation network can effectively reduce passenger travel time compared with the traditional public transportation network at similar costs. Finally, we applied the network design method for the Barkarby area in the north of Stockholm, Sweden. The results show that it is appropriate to allocate mobility on demand vehicles in this area. The constructed model and the proposed algorithm are scientifically valid and can provide theoretical methodological reference and decision support for engineering practice.

Für die Verkehrsnachfragemodellierung stehen dem Planer sehr differenzierte Modellansätze zur Verfügung. Ein wesentliches Unterscheidungskriterium stellt dabei der Modellierungsgegenstand dar. Der Fokus der vorliegenden Arbeit ist auf makroskopische Verkehrsplanungsmodelle gerichtet. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, in welcher Form die Ergebnisse großräumiger und lokaler Haushaltsbefragungen effizient bzw. sich gegenseitig ergänzend in Modellierungsaufgaben Einsatz finden können. Im Mittelpunkt der empirischen Datenanalyse steht die Frage, ob ein Unterschied in der Ausprägung zentraler modellierungsrelevanter Kenngrößen differenziert nach Raumtypen statistisch belegbar und planungspraktisch bedeutsam ist. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird auch die Auswirkung der komplexen Stichprobenpläne von MiD 2002 und SrV 2003 auf die Varianz der Parameterschätzung berücksichtigt. Ein in dieser Arbeit entwickelter, mehrstufiger Bewertungsalgorithmus, der dem Signifikanz-Relevanz-Problem hinreichend Rechnung trägt, bildet die Grundlage der Hypothesenprüfung. Er verbindet das Standardvorgehen (Signifikanztest) mit normativ gesetzten Effektgrößen und dem schätzerbasierten Vorgehen (Konfidenzintervalle). Eine besonders hohe Transparenz und Entscheidungskonsistenz erlangt der Ansatz dadurch, dass die Hypothesenprüfung auf Basis zweier voneinander unabhängig erhobener Untersuchungsgruppen (MiD, SrV) erfolgt. Die intensive Arbeit mit den Datengrundlagen MiD und SrV liefert eine Vielzahl von Erkenntnissen zur weiteren Qualifizierung des Erhebungsinstrumentes „Mobilität in Städten – SrV“. In Vorbereitung der im Jahre 2008 anstehenden Neuauflage der Erhebungsreihe wird nach Ansicht des Autors mit der Arbeit ein wesentlicher Impuls zur Weiterentwicklung der Methodik gegeben.