Abstract:

Accurate estimation of travel times is an important step in smart transportation and smart building systems. Poor estimation of travel times results in both frustrated users and wasted resources. Current methods that estimate travel times usually only return point estimates, losing important distributional information necessary for accurate decision-making. We propose using neural network-based mixture distributions to predict a user's travel times given their origin and destination coordinates. We show that our method correctly estimates the travel time distribution, maximizes utility in a downstream elevator scheduling task, and is easy to retrain—making it a versatile and an inexpensive-to-maintain module when deployed in smart crowd management systems.

Publisher's Version