  The capability of traffic-information systems to sense the movement of
millions of users and offer trip plans through mobile phones has enabled a new
way of optimizing city traffic dynamics, turning transportation big data into
insights and actions in a closed-loop and evaluating this approach in the real
world. Existing research has applied dynamic Bayesian networks and deep neural
networks to make traffic predictions from floating car data, utilized dynamic
programming and simulation approaches to identify how people normally travel
with dynamic traffic assignment for policy research, and introduced Markov
decision processes and reinforcement learning to optimally control traffic
signals. However, none of these works utilized floating car data to suggest
departure times and route choices in order to optimize city traffic dynamics.
In this paper, we present a study showing that floating car data can lead to
lower average trip time, higher on-time arrival ratio, and higher
Charypar-Nagel score compared with how people normally travel. The study is
based on optimizing a partially observable discrete-time decision process and
is evaluated in one synthesized scenario, one partly synthesized scenario, and
three real-world scenarios. This study points to the potential of a "living
lab" approach where we learn, predict, and optimize behaviors in the real
world.
