Title
Towards Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Coverage for Vehicular Urban Sensing Systems
Abstract
Vehicular urban sensing (VUS), which uses sensors mounted on crowdsourced vehicles or on-board drivers’ smartphones, has become a promising paradigm for monitoring critical urban metrics. Due to various hardware and software constraints difficult for private vehicles to satisfy, for-hire vehicles (FHVs) are usually the major forces for VUS systems. However, FHVs alone are far from enough for fine-grained spatio-temporal sensing coverage, because of their severe distribution biases. To address this issue, we propose to use a hybrid approach, where a centralized platform not only leverages FHVs to conduct sensing tasks during their daily movements of serving passenger orders, but also controls multiple dedicated sensing vehicles (DSVs) to bridge FHVs’ coverage gaps. Specifically, we aim to achieve fine-grained spatio-temporal sensing coverage at the minimum long-term operational cost by systematically optimizing the repositioning policy for DSVs. Technically, we formulate the problem as a stochastic dynamic program, and solve various challenges, including long-term cost minimization, stochastic demand with partial statistical knowledge, and computational intractability, by integrating distributionally robust optimization, primal-dual transformation, and second order conic programming methods. We validate the effectiveness of our methods using a real-world dataset from Shenzhen, China, containing 726,000 trajectories of 3848 taxis spanning overall 1 month in 2017.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488787
IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
critical urban metrics,private vehicles,for-hire vehicles,VUS systems,fine-grained spatio-temporal sensing coverage,sensing tasks,multiple dedicated sensing vehicles,fine-grained spatio-temporal coverage,vehicular urban sensing systems,crowdsourced vehicles,FHV coverage gaps
Conference
0743-166X
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-6654-3131-6
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guiyun Fan102.03
Yiran Zhao216312.19
Ziliang Guo300.34
Haiming Jin410412.12
Xiaoying Gan534448.16
Xinbing Wang62642214.43