Avishai Ceder

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The past COVID-19 pandemic introduced the world to the necessity of dealing with the trade-off between minimizing probability of contagion, and providing people with services they need. This trade-off stipulates that a large person-to-person distance will reduce contagion probability, but will render service inefficient, and vice versa. This work f...

The introduction of battery-powered electric buses (EBs) presents promising prospects for greener and more sustainable public transit. However, recharging activities of EBs to extend the total daily operation range, enabled by fast opportunity charging approach, create a significant challenge for attaining better, or equivalent, operational efficie...

Electronic business has expanded, resulting in flourishing rural e-commerce globally, and particularly in China. This paper introduces a novel rural public transit system that integrates passenger and freight services—a rural electric bus service that provides services for passengers and e-commerce packages. This blended service reduces logistical...

This study devises a novel hybrid public-transit service that uses modular autonomous vehicles (MAVs) coupled in one fleet that travels a fixed base route. MAVs can decouple from the fleet at the beginning of selected road segments and recouple to the fleet at the end of these segments. This allows a decoupled MAV to serve passengers who request do...

Transition to electrified transit vehicles has attracted a great public attention to achieve a greener public transport service. This work develops a methodology for multi-type electric buses (EBs) accommodating spatio-temporally imbalanced passenger demand to improve significantly the operating efficiency. However, a new complexity of this multi-t...

This work brings a novel planning and operational concept of the foreseen use of autonomous public transport vehicles through a new coupling–decoupling strategy. The defined problem covers vehicle scheduling, fleet composition, and the combined station location infrastructure in a joint optimization framework taking into consideration simultaneousl...

Abstract Even-headway timetables with easy to memorize departure times are commonly in use in public transport (PT) service. In addition, some PT services are using timetables where their departure times are based on even-passenger-load at the max-load stop along the route. In practice, these two types of timetables are implemented in daily operati...

With the emergence of innovations associated with public transport (PT) services, such as Mobility-as-a-Service, demand responsive transit, and autonomous vehicles, the door-to-door PT journey is achievable via multiple transfers between and within different PT modes. As such, seamless transfers between different modes of public transportation beco...

To achieve a green and sustainable public transit system, most transit agencies plan to completely replace current diesel and hybrid buses with battery-powered electric buses (EBs) in the decades ahead. Based on performances of EBs in practical operations, this study develops a transit fleet replacement model using multi-type EBs to determine an op...

Noninvasive EEG signals provide neural activity information at high resolution, of which human mental status can be properly detected. However, artefacts always exist in brain oscillatory EEG signals and thus impede the accuracy and reliability of relevant analysis, especially in real-world tasks. Moreover, the use of a mature artefact identificati...

The security travel of freight vehicles is of high societal concern and is the key issue for urban managers to effectively supervise and assess the possible social security risks. With continuous improvements in motion-based technology, the trajectories of freight vehicles are readily available, whose unusual changes may indicate hidden urban risks...

Unforeseeable developments will accompany progressive COVID-19 recovery globally. Similarly, science will inform changes amidst its own progress. Social isolation and distancing imposed by the pandemic are likely to result in changed habits, behavior, and thinking paradigms. Inevitably, this should affect the tremendous confusion inhibiting automat...

The use of smartphone applications (apps) to acquire real-time information for trip planning has become and progressively continues becoming a more instinctive behavior among public transport (PT) users. Thus, it becomes an integral part of the design and management of PT systems, but corresponding transit assignment models for improving the predic...

Designing or redesigning of a new public transport network with the objective of catering to the diverse needs of passengers and operators is a cumbersome and complex process that requires accommodation of conflicting viewpoints. The purpose of this chapter is to come up with a basic idea about how to design a public transport network that is suita...

Long-term travel time prediction, ahead of making a trip, is vital from the planning perspective of delivery freight, timetable design, vehicle/crew scheduling and further activities. The better the prediction is, the higher the reliability of service that can be offered. This study presents a discrete and continuous combined analysis for attaining...

The use of smartphone applications (apps) to acquire real time and readily available journey planning information is becoming instinctive behavior by public transport (PT) users. Through the apps, a passenger not only seeks a path from origin to destination, but a satisfactory path that caters to the passenger’s preferences at the desired time of t...

The purpose of this work is to review urban transportation likely to be offered in the future. Trip-making behaviour has already changed considerably as lifestyles change and they will continue to change in the future. This work reflects and places emphasis on profound thinking about the possibilities, rather than predicting them. Thoughts about po...

As a shared transport mode, public transit is important for leading transportation systems to develop in a sustainable manner. It is well known that the passenger demand along a bus line fluctuates throughout the day and is not distributed uniformly, both temporally and spatially. This non-uniformity warrants the use of multiple operational strateg...

Knowledge about mobility patterns has become increasingly important to urban development. In this work, public transit origin-destination (OD) mobility patterns are undergoing meso-level analysis in using the advantages of big data and for the creation of a new planning and decision-based tool. An ensemble clustering method is proposed to abstract...

Undesirable environmental impact of public transport (PT) and saving operational cost are of major importance to deal with. For a design of a new bus line, this plays a significant role on which fleet to purchase. The objectives of this work are to integrate vehicle procurement scheme and timetabling for a new feeder bus line with the constraint of...

Determining the best timetable for vehicles in a public transportation (PT) network is a complex problem, especially because it is just necessary to consider the requirements and satisfaction of passengers as the requirements of transportation companies. In this paper, a model of the PT timetabling problem which takes into consideration the passeng...

Urban rail transit (URT) demand often exhibits tidal or centripetal shapes during peak/off-peak hours. Inefficiency occurs when the supply of service is not adjusted to the fluctuating demand. This optimization can be realized by redesigning the URT timetables and/or through operational strategies. Certainly, implementation of the optimal/best-adju...

With the rapid development of smartphone applications, real-time and readily available journey planning information is becoming an integral part of a public transport (PT) system. Smartphones and other mobile devices are information sources capable of contributing to "big-data", and while each traveler has specific preference when undertaking a tri...

New advanced technologies have made it possible to deal with real-time schedule adjustments of public transport (PT) service. Indeed, using autonomous public transport vehicles (APTVs) prudently can result in significant improvements in the reliability, efficiency, and attractiveness of PT. The lack of human drivers and the feasible control strateg...

Facilities Location: Models and Methods, R. F. Love, J. G. Morris and G. O. Wesolowsky, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1988—reviewed by Martine Labbé. The Highway Design and Maintenance Standards Series:—five volumes—Vehicle Operating Costs: Evidence from Developing Countries, Andrew Chesher and Robert Harrison; Vehicle Speeds and Operating Costs: Model...

This second part of our work develops a model for delay estimation at intersections whose traffic signal controls are continuously being updated. Generally, these traffic signals are centrally controlled. The foundation for the delay estimation model is based on a queuing theory model called “Preemptive resume discipline for M/G/1 with two priority...

One of the most common measures of signalized intersection operation is the amount of delay a vehicle incurs while passing through the intersection. Traditional models for estimating vehicle delay at intersections generally assume fixed signal timing and uniform arrival rates for vehicles approaching the intersection. One would expect that highly v...

The major aim of this work is to develop a primary tool for the quantitative determination of land areas needed to fulfil the diverse functions of public transport. The need for such a tool is obvious; worldwide there is a lack of criteria for determining the types of areas needed, their size, and relative location in the urban system. Moreover, th...

This research extends the investigation of the relationships between measures of accidents and traffic flow, and considers the hourly flow instead of the average daily traffic (ADT), which has already been reported. The findings of this study serve as a basis for further clarification of the interactions between various levels of traffic flow and r...

This is a continuation of the investigation into relationships between accident rate and hourly traffic flow as outlined in Part I of the research. The underlying study attempts to determine appropriate models for single- and multi-vehicle accident rates in conjunction with free-flow and congested-flow conditions. For the free-flow data, the total...

This note gives simple equations for wave and shockwave velocities, using a graphical interpretation of speed-intercepts on the speed-concentration and speed-flow curves.

The minimization of weighted pedestrian and vehicle times for pedestrians dispersing at public gatherings is considered. An algorithm to solve this problem and to assign each pedestrian group to a unique selected path is developed. This algorithm considers general network where its arc values are dependent on pedestrian/traffic modelling and its no...

An attempt is made to furnish plausible explanations for some observed traffic-flow phenomena, based on known behavior of a pair of cars in a car-following situation, A fundamental psychophysical approach is applied deterministically in assessing actual driver performance. Observation of driver behavior in the traffic stream indicates that there ar...

An attempt is made to demonstrate the traffic behaviour and phenomena under normal morning peak period conditions, and to examine the suitability of a two-regime traffic flow model for these conditions. This paper has three main parts. First, the consistency of flow and concentration patterns of a 9-mile freeway section is examined and provides a b...

The purpose of this paper is to further improve the understanding of the relationships between measures of accidents (density and rate) and average daily traffic (ADT) on interurban road sections. The road sections studied are selected on the basis of carefully defined criteria. Power functions are fitted and classified according to: (i) a time-seq...