Papers for

fleet management companies

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Reinforcement learning encourages drivers to reduce traffic and emissions

Learning to Incentivise: Using Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Urban Mobility

Abstract: Traffic management has traditionally focused on toll-based and road pricing solutions. However, road pricing often raises concerns about accessibility and public dissatisfaction, leading to its prohibition in some places, such as Finland. This study optimises the dynamic allocation of incentives to drivers, encouraging them to reroute onto alternative (potentially longer) paths to achieve greater societal benefit, reduced total travel time (TTT) and total emissions in the transportation network, contributing to sustainable urban mobility. We employ a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach to dynamically assign incentives to drivers to reduce both TTT and emissions, with travel times estimated using traffic simulation software. We demonstrate that, with an unlimited budget and an objective of minimising travel time, the incentive scheme reduces TTT by 16%, compared to the dynamic User-Equilibrium (UE) with a budget equivalent to about 11% of the UE total time. When the goal is to minimise emissions, a 9% reduction in CO2 emissions is observed under an unlimited budget. We demonstrate a critical trade-off: minimising TTT leads to an increase in emissions, while prioritising emission reductions raises TTT. However, with the right combination of weights in the multi-objective function, both TTT and total emissions are improved beyond the baseline.

Wed 21 OctMultiagent SystemsMachine Learning
The gist
Traffic management often tries tolls to control congestion, but these can upset drivers or be banned. The authors use reinforcement learning to give drivers incentives to take less crowded routes, even if longer, reducing total travel time and emissions. Their system learns how to best offer rewards dynamically to improve overall traffic flow and air quality. They found that focusing only on time or emissions can worsen the other, but balancing both leads to benefits in traffic and pollution.
Open → 2610.30469v1

Driver coaching systems need local language and rules for each country

One Feedback System Does Not Fit All: Localising Data-to-Text Driver Coaching for the United Kingdom and Nigeria

Abstract: Data-to-text driver coaching is often presented as a generic pipeline from telematics events to advice. This paper argues that its content requires localisation because usefulness and credibility depend on drivers' knowledge, prevalent risks, regulation, infrastructure, and available data. Two independently developed systems in the United Kingdom and Nigeria are compared by tracing requirements through content selection, generation, and field evaluation. The UK system prioritises post-trip reflection, explanations tied to road and place context, and tone-sensitive wording. The Nigerian system combines legally grounded, once-daily Tips based on detected events with weekly persuasive Reports; it foregrounds safety education and alcohol-related risk in response to reported gaps in formal training and traffic-rule knowledge, as well as local road-safety priorities. Reliable speed-limit metadata supported speeding feedback in the UK, whereas its scarcity led the Nigerian evaluation to exclude speeding from its outcome metric. Both interventions were associated with reduced distance-normalised unsafe-event rates in their own field studies, although their designs and metrics preclude an effect-size comparison. The analysis yields a requirements-to-content design process for localising safety-critical NLG without treating a high-income deployment as the default.

Sun 13 SeptComputation and LanguageHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Driver coaching systems that give advice based on how people drive cannot use the exact same messages everywhere. The researchers showed that systems in the UK and Nigeria had different advice because of local road rules, risks, and driver knowledge. For example, speeding feedback worked well in the UK because detailed speed limits were available, but not in Nigeria where speed data was scarce. Both systems helped reduce unsafe driving events, but their messages and schedules had to be tailored to each country's needs.
Open → 2609.14687v1