Bus routes are typically updated every 3–5 years to meet constantly changing travel demands. However, identifying deficient bus routes and finding their optimal replacements remain challenging due to the difficulties in analyzing a complex bus network and the large solution space comprising alternative routes. Most of the automated approaches cannot produce satisfactory results in real-world settings without laborious inspection and evaluation of the candidates. The limitations observed in these approaches motivate us to collaborate with domain experts and propose a visual analytics solution for the performance analysis and incremental planning of bus routes based on an existing bus network. Developing such a solution involves three major challenges, namely, a) the in-depth analysis of complex bus route networks, b) the interactive generation of improved route candidates, and c) the effective evaluation of alternative bus routes. For challenge a, we employ an overview-to-detail approach by dividing the analysis of a complex bus network into three levels to facilitate the efficient identification of deficient routes. For challenge b, we improve a route generation model and interpret the performance of the generation with tailored visualizations. For challenge c, we incorporate a conflict resolution strategy in the progressive decision-making process to assist users in evaluating the alternative routes and finding the most optimal one. The proposed system is evaluated with two usage scenarios based on real-world data and received positive feedback from the experts. Index Terms-Bus route planning, spatial decision-making, urban data visual analytics

Towards Better Bus Networks: A Visual Analytics Approach

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A Survey of Human-Centered Evaluations in Human-Centered Machine Learning

The automotive industry is one of the most competitive sectors, and it requires a well-structured logistics system to meet the industry' vital requirements such as just-in-time, lean and agile supply chain operations, productivity and sustainability. Well-located and well-designed warehouses can make reaching these aims for the automotive industry possible and more accessible. Hence, determining a location for a warehouse is a highly critical, tactical, and managerial resolution for the automotive industry, as there is a strong correlation between well-located warehouses and the well-structured logistics network in the automotive industry. Although the WSS is a significant decision-making problem, we observed four critical and severe gaps in the existing literature: (1) the authors preferred to apply traditional objective & subjective frames, and they overlooked existing highly complicated uncertainties. (2) The number of studies focusing on the WSS problem in the automotive industry is surprisingly scarce. (3) It is not sufficiently clear how these factors used in the previous studies were determined, which causes doubts about their reliability. (4) there is no satisfactory evidence of which approaches were used to identify the factors in the previous papers. By considering these gaps, we propose two approaches which can be accepted as a novelty of the paper. First is the extension of the Delphi techniques based on the Fermetean fuzzy sets (FFs) used for identifying the criteria. It also combines the two traditional approaches (i.e., literature review and professionals' evaluations to identify the criteria) with the FF-Delphi technique. The second is the Double Normalized MARCOS approach based on FFs (FF- DN MARCOS) implemented to identify the weights of the criteria and ranking performance of the alternatives. The proposed model was implemented to identify the best warehouse location for the automotive manufacturing company. The results show that the C1 “energy availability & cost” criterion is the most influential criterion and the C5 proximity to port and customs criterion is the second most crucial factor. Then we executed a comprehensive sensitivity analysis, and the results approved the suggested model's validity and robustness despite excessive modifications in the criteria weights. 

Warehouse site selection for the automotive industry using a fermatean fuzzy-based decision-making approach

The spatial time series generated by city sensors allow us to observe urban phenomena like environmental pollution and traffic congestion at an unprecedented scale. However, recovering causal relations from these observations to explain the sources of urban phenomena remains a challenging task because these causal relations tend to be time-varying and demand proper time series partitioning for effective analyses. The prior approaches extract one causal graph given long-time observations, which cannot be directly applied to capturing, interpreting, and validating dynamic urban causality. This paper presents Compass, a novel visual analytics approach for in-depth analyses of the dynamic causality in urban time series. To develop Compass, we identify and address three challenges: detecting urban causality, interpreting dynamic causal relations, and unveiling suspicious causal relations. First, multiple causal graphs over time among urban time series are obtained with a causal detection framework extended from the Granger causality test. Then, a dynamic causal graph visualization is designed to reveal the time-varying causal relations across these causal graphs and facilitate the exploration of the graphs along the time. Finally, a tailored multi-dimensional visualization is developed to support the identification of spurious causal relations, thereby improving the reliability of causal analyses. The effectiveness of Compass is evaluated with two case studies conducted on the real-world urban datasets, including the air pollution and traffic speed datasets, and positive feedback was received from domain experts. 

Compass: Towards Better Causal Analysis of Urban Time Series

Supply chain (SC) activities generate huge amount of data that can be used in decision making processes. However, proper data analytics techniques are required to combine, organize, and analyze data from different sources and produce required insights available for decision makers. These techniques promote analytical reasoning of the events and patterns hidden in the data using visualizations, so-called Visual Analytics (VA). Although there is a large number of VA systems to facilitate the process of analysis and decision making, there is a lack of an adequate overview of what already exists in this area for SC management. To address that need, we conducted a systematic literature review to analyze the state of the art in SC VA systems. Particularly, we focus on use cases, the type of the decisions that a VA system intended to support, the type of visualizations employed, the type of analytics used, and the data that has been used for analysis. The goal of this study is to provide SC and VA researchers with an overview of the works carried out in the field of SC VA, helping them to observe latest trends and to recognize existing gaps that need further investigation. Consequently, a mapping between decisions of various SC business processes and their reciprocal visualization techniques and tactics have been provided. Adding to that, VA applications and use cases in SC are identified based on the SC Operation Reference (SCOR) model and underlying decision areas are recognized.

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Visual Analytics for Decision Support: A Supply Chain Perspective

Selecting a proper warehouse location serving to satisfy the demands of the goods from a certain business area is important to a successful retail business. However, the large solution space, uncertain traffic conditions, and varying business preferences impose great challenges on warehouse location selection. Conventional approaches mainly summarize relevant evaluation criteria and compile them into an analysis report to facilitate rapid data absorption but fail to support a comprehensive and joint decision‐making process in warehouse location selection. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics approach to facilitating warehouse location selection. We first visually centralize relevant information of warehouses and adapts a widely‐used methodology to efficiently rank warehouse candidates. We then design a delivering estimation model based on massive logistics trajectories to resolve the uncertainty issue of traffic conditions of warehouses. Based on these techniques, an interactive framework is proposed to generate and explore the candidate warehouses. We conduct a case study and a within‐subject study with baseline systems to assess the efficacy of our system. Experts ‘feedback also suggests that our approach indeed helps them better tackle the problem of finding an ideal warehouse in the field of retail logistics management.

Warehouse Vis: A Visual Analytics Approach to Facilitating Warehouse Location Selection for Business Districts

Shuttle buses have been a popular means to move commuters sharing similar origins and destinations during periods of high travel demand. However, planning and deploying reasonable, customized service bus systems becomes challenging when the commute demand is rather dynamic. It is difficult, if not impossible to form a reliable, unbiased estimation of user needs in such a case using traditional modeling methods. We propose a visual analytics approach to facilitating assessment of actual, varying travel demands and planning of night customized shuttle systems. A preliminary case study verifies the efficacy of our approach.

A Visual Analytics Approach to Scheduling Customized Shuttle Buses via Perceiving Passengers’ Travel Demands

A Visual Analytics Approach to Scheduling Customized Shuttle Buses via Perceiving Passengers' Travel Demands

Compensation management is one of the most important elements of personnel management. One type of compensation is traffic supplementary pay for the overtime employees. Conventional analysis of the traffic reimbursement focuses on the basic financial statistics such as the expenditure trends and rankings among different departments in the company. However, it largely ignores the wellbeing of the individuals and their residential distribution that can help improve the effectiveness of compensation strategies. In this work, we propose a visual analytics system based on a company’s traffic reimbursement data for the overtime. It assists the compensation managers in understanding the overtime employees’ commuting status and providing more indirect compensation benefits for the employees. A user case confirms the efficacy of our system and experts’ feedback also suggests that our approach indeed helps them better tackle the problem of analyzing the car-hailing reimbursement data for the overtime. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing → Visualization; Visualization design and evaluation methods;

Visual Analysis of Car-hailing Reimbursement Data for Overtime

The invention discloses a warehouse site selection method, device and equipment and a storage medium, and the method comprises the steps: receiving a warehouse site selection request which comprises atarget region; based on the reference object of the target area, calculating the operation cost of warehouse building of each warehouse in the target area, and generating a warehouse list according to the operation cost by using a warehouse recommendation algorithm; and based on the warehouse list, generating a warehouse site selection scheme according to the type of the warehouse site selectionscheme. Therefore, on the basis of artificial intelligence, the warehouse list is generated according to the warehouse building operation cost of each warehouse in the target area, and then the warehouse site selection scheme corresponding to the warehouse site selection scheme type is generated on the basis of the warehouse list, so that the workload of warehouse site selection is reduced, and intelligent decision of warehouse site selection is realized.

Liu Qiangqiang

Papers

Warehouse Vis: A Visual Analytics Approach to Facilitating Warehouse Location Selection for Business Districts

A Visual Analytics Approach to Scheduling Customized Shuttle Buses via Perceiving Passengers’ Travel Demands

A Visual Analytics Approach to Scheduling Customized Shuttle Buses via Perceiving Passengers' Travel Demands

Visual Analysis of Car-hailing Reimbursement Data for Overtime

Warehouse site selection method, device and equipment and storage medium