PIPages
Labs

Mohamed Mokbel

University of Minnesota, MN·Computer Science

Delivery companies, ride-sharing services and navigation apps all assume that the digital map underneath them is correct, but real maps are often wrong or incomplete. Reports cited in this project estimate that map errors cost US delivery companies billions of dollars a year.

Fields

Computer Science

Engineering

Topics

map services

map accuracy

trajectory data

Grants
1 known grant, through Aug 2027

What they work on

  1. Infer missing road and traffic-related map information, beyond basic road layout, by combining vehicle trajectory data with open-source maps to build more complete and accurate maps.
  2. Characterize the error patterns of map query processors, the software behind routing and nearby-facility searches, and use those patterns to calibrate query results.
  3. Build software infrastructure that improves the efficiency of map services such as routing and location search by running them over the more accurate, metadata-rich maps.

More about the research

The cost will likely grow as more traffic shifts from casual drivers to delivery and ride-sharing fleets. This project aims to make map services more accurate by improving both the maps themselves and the software that answers questions about them.

Why it matters

More accurate maps and route queries could cut costly delays for delivery companies, ride-sharing services and other transportation and location-based services that handle large numbers of users. Map inaccuracy already costs US delivery firms billions of dollars a year, so even modest gains in map and query accuracy could save fuel, time and money.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

III: Small: Towards Highly Accurate Map Services

NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027

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Develop exact solution methods for transportation network design under user equilibrium that combine high-point relaxations, value-function cuts and strong duality cuts to find provably optimal designs faster.

Xuegang Ban

University of Washington, WA·Engineering

Adapt and scale privacy-preserving techniques so that traffic, trajectory, and naturalistic driving data can be shared securely under both centralized and distributed data-sharing models, and evaluate them on real-world transportation datasets.

The school

University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Minnesota

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