A Federated Mixed Logit Model for Personal Mobility Service in Autonomous Transportation Systems

Abstract

Looking ahead to the future-stage autonomous transportation system (ATS), personal mobility service (PMS) aims to provide the recommended travel options based on both microscopic individual travel demand and the macroscopic supply system objectives. Such a goal relies on massive heterogeneous data to interpret and predict user travel intentions, facing the challenges caused by prevalent centralized approaches, such as an unbalanced utilization rate between cloud and edge, and data privacy. To fill the gap, we propose a federated logit model (FMXL), for estimating user preferences, which integrates a discrete choice model—the mixed logit model (MXL), with a novel decentralized learning paradigm—federated learning (FL). FMXL supports PMS by (1) respectively performing local and global estimation at the client and server to optimize the load, (2) collaboratively approximating the posterior of the standard mixed logit model through a continuous interaction mechanism, and (3) flexibly configuring two specific global estimation methods (sampling and aggregation) to accommodate different estimation scenarios. Moreover, the predicted rates of FMXL are about 10% higher compared to a flat logit model in both static and dynamic estimation. Meanwhile, the estimation time has been reduced by about 40% compared to a centralized MXL model. Our model can not only protect user privacy and improve the utilization of edge resources but also significantly improve the accuracy and timeliness of recommendations, thus enhancing the performance of PMS in ATS.