This paper presents a data-driven method for transit network design that relies on a large sample of user location data available from mobile phone telecommunication networks. Such data provide opportunistic sensing and the means for transit operators to match supply with mobility demand inferred from mobile phone locations. In contrast to previous methods of transit network design, the proposed method is entirely data driven, leveraging the large-sample properties of disaggregate mobile phone network data and mobility pattern mining. The method works by deriving frequent patterns of movements from anonymized mobile phone location data and merging them to generate candidate route designs. Additional routines for optimal route selection and service frequency setting are then employed to select a network configuration made up of routes that maximizes systemwide traveler utility. Using data from half a million mobile phone users in Abidjan from the telco operator Orange, we demonstrated to provide resource-neutral system improvement of 27% in terms of end-user journey times.

The deep penetration of mobile phones offers cities the ability to opportunistically monitor citizens' mobility and use data-driven insights to better plan and manage services. With large scale data on mobility patterns, operators can move away from the costly, mostly survey based, transportation planning processes, to a more data-centric view, that places the instrumented user at the center of development. In this framework, using mobile phone data to perform transit analysis and optimization represents a new frontier with significant societal impact, especially in developing countries. In this paper we present AllAboard, an intelligent tool that analyses cellphone data to help city authorities in visually exploring urban mobility and optimizing public transport. This is performed within a self contained tool, as opposed to the current solutions which rely on a combination of several distinct tools for analysis, reporting, optimisation and planning. An interactive user interface allows transit operators to visually explore the travel demand in both space and time, correlate it with the transit network, and evaluate the quality of service that a transit network provides to the citizens at very fine grain. Operators can visually test scenarios for transit network improvements, and compare the expected impact on the travellers' experience. The system has been tested using real telecommunication data for the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and evaluated from a data mining, optimisation and user prospective.

In this paper we address the use of mobile phone location data to build urban sensing applications. In the past decade, several research works have proposed the use of different types of location data from the telecommunication network to characterise people mobility in the city. Thus, several applications to infer urban dynamics where proposed. However, different papers have used different types of mobile phone location data, making it is difficult to understand whether a particular dataset provided by a telecom operator is indeed effective for a specific urban sensing application. In this paper we address this issue by comparing the quality of the insights extracted from different types of mobile phone location data, with specific reference to two urban sensing applications: people count by location, and people flow between locations. Experiments executed on a real dataset provided by a telecom operator in Belgium show the advantages of using network-driven mobile phone location data (collected regardless on whether people are using their phone) compared to the widely used Call Detail Records.

The deep penetration of mobile phones offers cities the ability to opportunistically monitor citizensfi mobility and use data-driven insights to better plan and manage services. In this context, transit operators can leverage pervasive mobile sensing to better match observed demand for travel with their service offerings. In this paper we present AllAboard, an intelligent tool that analyses cellphone data to helps city authorities in exploring urban mobility and optimizing public transport. An interactive user interface allows transit operators to explore the travel demand in both space and time, evaluate the quality of service that a transit network provides to the citizens, and test scenarios for transit network improvements. The system has been tested using real telecommunication data for the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and evaluated from a data mining, optimization and user prospective.

The dynamics of social events happening in large metropolitan areas are extremely complex. Location-based user generated data could be an exceptionally rich source of information about events, however the vastness and the heterogeneity of such information makes it almost impossible for city managers to have a comprehensive view. Some events are planned and advertised only among restricted communities, for many it is problematic to estimate the number of attendees, and in general it is very difficult to have information about citizen mobility in areas nearby or where events happen. In this paper, we describe EXSED, an interactive intelligent tool to support the visual exploration of social events dynamics along the spatial, temporal and organizational dimensions. Major functionalities include: (i) studying events that are either officially/unofficially planned and with global/local scope, (ii) extract discussion topics for an event and investigate their temporal and spatial profile, (iii) estimate event attendees and correlate their mobility patterns with the event evolution. We present preliminary results of a field study with officials from Dublin City Council (Ireland), who evaluated our tool on real world user-generated tweeter data and events in the city.

A city offers thousands of social events a day, and it is difficult for dwellers to make choices. The combination of mobile phones and recommender systems can change the way one deals with such abundance. Mobile phones with positioning technology are now widely available, making it easy for people to broadcast their whereabouts, recommender systems can now identify patterns in people's movements in order to, for example, recommend events. To do so, the system relies on having mobile users who share their attendance at a large number of social events: cold-start users, who have no location history, cannot receive recommendations. We set out to address the mobile cold-start problem by answering the following research question: how can social events be recommended to a cold-start user based only on his home location? To answer this question, we carry out a study of the relationship between preferences for social events and geography, the first of its kind in a large metropolitan area. We sample location estimations of one million mobile phone users in Greater Boston, combine the sample with social events in the same area, and infer the social events attended by 2,519 residents. Upon this data, we test a variety of algorithms for recommending social events. We find that the most effective algorithm recommends events that are popular among residents of an area. The least effective, instead, recommends events that are geographically close to the area. This last result has interesting implications for location-based services that emphasize recommending nearby events.

In this paper, we propose a tool to explore human movement dynamics in a Metropolitan Area. By analyzing a mass of individual cell phone traces, we build a Human-City Interaction System for understanding urban mobility patterns at different user-controlled temporal and geographic scales. We solve the problems that are found in available tools for spatio-temporal analysis, by allowing seamless manipulability and introducing a simultaneous\multi-scale visualization of individual and aggregate flows. Our tool is built to support the exploration and discovery of urban mobility patterns and the daily interactions of millions of people. Moreover, we implement an intelligent algorithm to evaluate the level of mobility homophily of people moving from place to place.

The traditional relationship between the car, driver, and city can be described as waypoint navigation with additional traffic and maintenance information. The car can receive and store waypoint information, find the shortest route to these waypoints, integrate traffic information, find points-of-interest, and alert the driver of a pre-programmed set of maintenance issues related to the car. Here, we propose a new route system that is multi-goal-centric rather than waypoint-centric. Instead of focusing on determining the route to a specified waypoint, as done in commercially available navigation systems, the system will analyze the driver's behavior in order to extract the potential set(s) of goals that the driver would like to achieve. The system must also understand the city on a number of levels: physical, social, and commercial. This provides the foundation for a social and intelligent driving assistant, that helps the driver achieve his goals and helps the city perform better through interaction between both entities.

Composition of web services is of great interest to support business-to-business collaboration and provide value added services with desired properties or capabilities. Nevertheless, the standard languages used to create business processes from composite web services lack of formal definition of their semantics and tools to support the analysis of a business process. In this paper we provide a practical approach to formal verification of BPEL4WS executable processes. A syntax-driven operational semantics for BPEL4WS is introduced and an automatic verifier is presented in order to perform a semantic analysis of the flow constructs used in the definition of BPEL4WS processes.