Prof. Simon Hu’s Interdisciplinary Research Project Gets Funded
Prof. Simon Hu’s project on ‘Demand Forecasting and Management of Ride-Sourcing Fleet for Smart Cities’ has recently funded by Academy of Humanities and Social Society at Zhejiang University. The project will jointly lead with Prof. Chao Wu from School of Public Affairs. It’s an interdisciplinary project and will be collaborating with faculties from three departments across the campus: School of Public Affairs, College of Computer Science and Technology and ZJU-UIUC Institute.
The proposed project will tackle the problem of demand prediction and management for ride-sourcing services. The continued trend of urbanisation and the resulting boom of mega-cities throughout the developing world requires an expansion of infrastructure systems unprecedented in both scale and rapidity. If carefully planned, the development of future transport systems for mega-cities is an opportunity to achieve many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The expansion of conventional mass-transit systems alone is not capable of keeping up with the rapid growth in demand. Moreover, it fails to provide inclusivity, as it is often not possible or convenient for the elderly or people with disabilities to use conventional public transport. Therefore, it is of strategical importance to find innovative solutions to complement traditional public transport modes. The on-demand ride-sourcing services currently operating in many cities provide a promising way to offer a more efficient urban mobility system. The demand prediction and management are key issues for the successful implementation of such mobility service. Some of our earlier studies on applying the machine learning and convolutional neural network (CNN) models showed some promising results. In this project, we have a strong interdisciplinary team to combine our expertise to tackle the challenge.
This project is supported by the Academy of Social Sciences at Zhejiang university and aim to promote cross-disciplinary research teams to tackle the big challenges in our society. In this round of application, there are 22 successful projects got funded.
The proposed project will tackle the problem of demand prediction and management for ride-sourcing services. The continued trend of urbanisation and the resulting boom of mega-cities throughout the developing world requires an expansion of infrastructure systems unprecedented in both scale and rapidity. If carefully planned, the development of future transport systems for mega-cities is an opportunity to achieve many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The expansion of conventional mass-transit systems alone is not capable of keeping up with the rapid growth in demand. Moreover, it fails to provide inclusivity, as it is often not possible or convenient for the elderly or people with disabilities to use conventional public transport. Therefore, it is of strategical importance to find innovative solutions to complement traditional public transport modes. The on-demand ride-sourcing services currently operating in many cities provide a promising way to offer a more efficient urban mobility system. The demand prediction and management are key issues for the successful implementation of such mobility service. Some of our earlier studies on applying the machine learning and convolutional neural network (CNN) models showed some promising results. In this project, we have a strong interdisciplinary team to combine our expertise to tackle the challenge.
More details on project information can be found on this website: https://rwsk.zju.edu.cn/2020/0408/c28729a2043625/page.htm