ICN: Interactive Convolutional Network for Forecasting Travel Demand of Shared Micromobility

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Interactive Convolutional Network (ICN), a deep learning model that leverages multi-dimensional spatial data and interactive convolution to accurately forecast spatiotemporal shared micromobility demand, aiding transportation planning.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel ICN model with channel dilation and multi-resolution feature extraction for improved demand forecasting in shared micromobility systems.

Findings

ICN significantly outperforms benchmark models in case studies.

The model effectively captures temporal and spatial dependencies.

Predictions assist in vehicle rebalancing and system management.

Abstract

Accurate shared micromobility demand predictions are essential for transportation planning and management. Although deep learning models provide powerful tools to deal with demand prediction problems, studies on forecasting highly-accurate spatiotemporal shared micromobility demand are still lacking. This paper proposes a deep learning model named Interactive Convolutional Network (ICN) to forecast spatiotemporal travel demand for shared micromobility. The proposed model develops a novel channel dilation method by utilizing multi-dimensional spatial information (i.e., demographics, functionality, and transportation supply) based on travel behavior knowledge for building the deep learning model. We use the convolution operation to process the dilated tensor to simultaneously capture temporal and spatial dependencies. Based on a binary-tree-structured architecture and interactive convolution, the ICN model extracts features at different temporal resolutions, and then generates predictions using a fully-connected layer. The proposed model is evaluated for two real-world case studies in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. The results show that the ICN model significantly outperforms all the selected benchmark models. The model predictions can help the micromobility operators develop optimal vehicle rebalancing schemes and guide cities to better manage the shared micromobility system.