Spatio-temporal Data Analysis and Intelligent Optimization Theory for Logistics

Truck capacity prediction based on self-attention mechanism in the bulk logistic industry

  • Xiaobian MIAO ,
  • Jiajun LIAO ,
  • Huajie MEI ,
  • Chong FENG ,
  • Jiali MAO
Expand
  • 1. School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China
    2. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Hangzhou 310000, China

Received date: 2022-07-10

  Online published: 2022-09-26

Abstract

Capacity prediction plays an important role in smart logistics, and its results are important for improving the accuracy of capacity scheduling and truck-cargo matching. Existing researches on capacity prediction in urban road networks aim to determine the number of available vehicles in future periods, while the problem of capacity prediction in bulk logistics aims at predicting the information on the trucks (e.g. the truck’s identity document (ID)) to carry certain types of goods for different flows, which is closely related to whether the trucks can return to the steel plant within the expected time (called capacity accessibility). In the case of bulk logistics, it is necessary to take into account the impact of the time spent on the two trips from the steel plant to the customer’s business and back to the steel plant. Since trucks need to stop several times in the long-distance transportation process but the length of stopping time varies, the uncertainty of stopping time makes the accurate prediction of transportation delivery time difficult. In addition, the freight platform only assigns capacity to one-way transport tasks (i.e. from the steel plant to the customer’s business), and the return trip (i.e. back to the steel plant) is determined by the truck drivers, which leads to the lack of return trajectory and poses a challenge to predict the return time of trucks to the steel plant. In order to solve the above challenges, based on the data sets of waybills, trucks, trajectories, and transport endpoints of logistics enterprises, we extract the stay behavior features, transport endpoint features, and environmental features. Then, the self-attention mechanism is introduced to obtain the weights of different features on the time consumption of two trips respectively to further improve the accuracy of capacity accessibility prediction. On this basis, a truck capacity prediction method based on self-attention mechanism is proposed, including capacity candidate set generation based on historical flow similarity, capacity accessibility prediction based on self-attention mechanism, and capacity carrier flow prediction based on long short-term memory (LSTM). Finally, the experimental results of comparison experiments on real logistics datasets show that the proposed method has higher prediction accuracy and can provide powerful decision support for the optimization of capacity scheduling in bulk logistics.

Cite this article

Xiaobian MIAO , Jiajun LIAO , Huajie MEI , Chong FENG , Jiali MAO . Truck capacity prediction based on self-attention mechanism in the bulk logistic industry[J]. Journal of East China Normal University(Natural Science), 2022 , 2022(5) : 165 -183 . DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1000-5641.2022.05.014

References

1 ZHOU W, YANG Y, ZHANG Y, et al. Deep flexible structure spatial-temporal model for taxi capacity prediction. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2020, 205, 106286.
2 WONG R C P, SZETO W Y, WONG S C. A two-stage approach to modeling vacant taxi movements. Transportation Research Procedia, 2015, (7): 147- 163.
3 JINDAL I, QIN Z W, CHEN X W, et al. A unified neural network approach for estimating travel time and distance for a taxi trip [EB/OL]. (2017-10-12)[2022-06-22]. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.04350.pdf
4 LI Y G, FU K, WANG Z, et al. Multi-task representation learning for travel time estimation [C]// Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 2018: 1695-1704.
5 WANG H J, TANG X F, KUO Y H, et al. A simple baseline for travel time estimation using large-scale trip data. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2019, 10 (2): 19.
6 YANG Z C, YANG D Y, DYER C, et al. Hierarchical attention networks for document classification [C]// Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2016: 1480-1489.
7 HOCHREITER S, SCHMIDHUBER J. Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 1997, 9 (8): 1735- 1780.
8 KAMARIANAKIS Y, PRASTACOS P. Space-time modeling of traffic flow. Computers and Geosciences, 2005, 31 (2): 119- 133.
9 CASTRO-NETO M, JEONG Y S, JEONG M K, et al. Online-SVR for short-term traffic flow prediction under typical and atypical traffic conditions. Expert Systems with Applications, 2009, 36 (3): 6164- 6173.
10 LESHEM G, RITOV Y. Traffic flow prediction using adaboost algorithm with random forests as a weak learner [J]. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2007, 2(2): 111-116.
11 ZHANG J B, ZHENG Y, QI D K. Deep spatio-temporal residual networks for citywide crowd flows prediction [C]// 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2017: 1655-1661.
12 WANG D, CAO W, LI J, et al. DeepSD: Supply-demand prediction for online car-hailing services using deep neural networks [C]// 2017 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). IEEE, 2017: 243-254. DOI: 10.1109/ICDE.2017.83.
13 KE J T, YANG H, ZHENG H Y, et al. Hexagon-based convolutional neural network for supply-demand forecasting of ride-sourcing services. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2019, 20 (11): 4160- 4173.
14 JENELIUS E, KOUTSOPOULOS H N. Travel time estimation for urban road networks using low frequency probe vehicle data. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2013, 53, 64- 81.
15 WANG Z, FU K, YE J P. Learning to estimate the travel time [C]// Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 2018: 858-866.
16 YAN S, CHEN X, HUO R, et al. Learning to build user-tag profile in recommendation system [C]// Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management. ACM, 2020: 2877-2884.
17 BENGIO Y, SIMARD P, FRASCONI P. Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 1994, 5 (2): 157- 166.
18 WU C H, HO J M, LEE D T. Travel-time prediction with support vector regression. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2004, 5 (4): 276- 281.
19 BREIMAN L. Random forests. Machine Learning, 2001, 45 (1): 5- 32.
20 WANG D, ZHANG J B, CAO W, et al. When will you arrive? Estimating travel time based on deep neural networks [C]// Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2018: 2500-2507.
21 GUO G D, WANG H, BELL D, et al. kNN model-based approach in classification [C]// On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2003: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, OTM 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2888. Berlin: Springer, 2003: 986-996.
22 朱军, 胡文波. 贝叶斯机器学习前沿进展综述. 计算机研究与发展, 2015, 52 (1): 16- 26.
23 FRIEDMAN J H. Greedy function approximation: A gradient boosting machine. Annals of Statistics, 2001, 1189- 1232.
24 王黎明, 王连, 杨楠. 应用时间序列分析 [M]. 上海: 复旦大学出版社, 2008.
Outlines

/