2026-10-20

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 3550 candidates — 7 worth your time· 50 without an open abstract

Headline

Personalised accessibility, generative mobility models, and emergency vehicle routing systems

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
shares references
no items share references today counted over the 7 papers published above
on the same shoulders
4 of the day's papers cite Travel and the Built Environment (Reid Ewing, Robert Cervero 2010) counted over the 47 of this day's 57 named papers whose reference lists we have — standing on the same older work is not the same as being about the same thing
first appearance
Christ University; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Padova; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory none of them on a paper we published in the 130 days before this issue

Two counts, not one counted twice: every row here but “on the same shoulders” counts the papers published above, and that one counts every paper this day named — those and the ones under Also published today, whose abstracts we could not read.

Researchers built and deployed an interactive web framework that calculates individual-level urban accessibility scores based on user-defined preferences and walkability thresholds. Evaluated in Toulouse, France, an agent-based daily multimodal mobility model compared fifteen decision-making approaches against a real household travel survey. Additionally, energy cost stress tests were conducted on modelled income distributions for nearly one million properties across six English local authorities to map vulnerability under various price scenarios.

published: Discover Cities

Prabhanjana Ghuriki, S. Chanti
Discover Cities

Christ University

Urban Transport and Accessibility · Urban Design and Spatial Analysis · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Christ University

An interactive framework for personalised urban accessibility assessment

Researchers built and deployed a web framework that calculates individual-level urban accessibility scores based on user-defined preferences, amenity weights, and walkability thresholds. The system precomputes shortest-path routing with rectangular travel impedance so that custom map queries require only lightweight arithmetic at run time. An evaluation across Bengaluru wards showed that individual user preferences alter ward rankings significantly more than choice of spatial aggregation method.

Why it matters — This system bridges the gap between static, one-size-fits-all walkability indices and complex GIS workflows, allowing non-expert residents to calculate personalized accessibility maps interactively.

Caveat: The fast interactive computations rely on a rectangular travel impedance function, which simplifies distance decay into strict step-function cutoffs for amenity reachability.

Discover Cities · doi

published: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Mauro Faccin, Tomas Scagliarini, Manlio De Domenico
arXiv physics.soc-ph · was arXiv physics.soc-ph

Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Ecosystem dynamics and resilience · University of Padua · Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Padova

Systemic collapse emergence from climate-induced perturbations in transportation networks

The study introduces a coupled dynamic framework that models transportation networks as complex systems interacting with external spatial fields, using real-world railway networks exposed to rainfall as a primary case study. The model identifies a critical threshold in rainfall intensity where local disruptions transition into systemic transportation collapse. It introduces metrics for system perturbability and societal risk to map structural vulnerabilities across the broader rail infrastructure under localized environmental perturbations.

Why it matters — Instead of treating weather disruptions as uniform or purely localized events, this framework quantifies the exact threshold at which weather perturbations induce cascading system-wide collapse in transport networks.

Caveat: The framework is demonstrated on railway systems under rainfall, so its parameters may require recalibration for other infrastructure systems or extreme weather hazards.

arXiv · pdf · doi

preprint

Yves Bru, Kamaldeep Singh Oberoi, Benoit Gaudou
arXiv cs.MA

agent-based model · large language model · travel survey

Towards Adaptive and Real-Survey-Aligned Simulated Urban Mobility Behaviour of Generative Agents

An agent-based daily multimodal mobility model was evaluated for Toulouse, France, comparing fifteen decision-making approaches on a real household travel survey. The testing evaluated simple baselines, survey-fitted models, Generative Agents (GAs) using minimal and tuned prompts, and the Jev-1.13 TypeSafe classifier. GAs with tuned prompts achieved modal splits comparable to survey-fitted models under normal conditions and adapted to unexpected disruptions, though they did not match performance on a trip-by-trip basis.

Why it matters — This demonstrates that large language model-based agents can approximate aggregate urban mode choice and dynamically respond to unexpected transit disruptions without requiring hand-coded rules or predefined survey variables.

Caveat: While tuned GAs match overall modal split, they struggle to correctly predict individual choices at the trip level.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Yunfei Bai, Aaron Tesfa Tsion, Raúl Rosales, et al.
arXiv physics.soc-ph

Energy and Environment Impacts · Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies · Housing Market and Economics · King's College London

Hidden urban exposure to energy-price shocks: spreading burdens and shifting hotspots

By stress-testing required energy costs against modelled income distributions for nearly one million properties across six English local authorities, this study maps vulnerability under different price scenarios. Under gas-led crisis prices, 41% of neighbourhoods in the top quartile for exposure fall outside the highest official fuel-poverty quartile. In a scenario where electricity prices triple from 2021 levels, 38% of exposed neighbourhoods shift to areas with newer, more energy-efficient housing and higher proportions of flats.

Why it matters — It demonstrates that official fuel-poverty metrics miss significant vulnerability during price spikes, revealing that decarbonised heating transitions introduce novel exposure risks to households outside traditional hardship zones.

Caveat: The analysis relies on modelled local income distributions and required energy usage estimates rather than observed household expenditure data.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Qinwen Tang, Tianyi Wang, Nan Zhou, et al.
arXiv physics.soc-ph

Building Energy and Comfort Optimization · Climate Change Policy and Economics · Building energy efficiency and sustainability · energy consumption data · China · United States

Commercial building decarbonization across countries: Future emission trajectories and mitigation priorities

Combining a Kaya-based emission model with Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis, this study projects operational carbon emissions for commercial buildings across 16 countries from 2024 to 2060. Under a business-as-usual pathway, China's commercial building emissions peak at 1150 (+-120) MtCO2 in 2033 (+-5 years), while US emissions show the highest carbon lock-in at 470 (+-89) MtCO2. China, the US, and Japan account for 84.7%-88.9% of the total cross-country mitigation potential, which reaches 1123 MtCO2 annually by 2060, driven predominantly by space heating and appliances.

Why it matters — It quantifies long-term decarbonization limits and specific end-use targets across major economies, demonstrating that global commercial building mitigation depends almost entirely on policy interventions in three nations.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Vincent Sello, Timothy Adeliyi, Ridewaan Hanslo
arXiv cs.AI

Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods · Robotic Path Planning Algorithms · Transportation Planning and Optimization · University of Johannesburg

CARRS: A Constraint-Aware, Real-Time Routing System for Emergency Vehicles in Urban Environments

The Constraint-Aware Real-Time Routing System (CARRS) merges classical pathfinding algorithms like A*, Dijkstra, and Bidirectional A* with Constraint Satisfaction Problem methodologies to optimize emergency vehicle travel. Tested on major metropolitan road networks using OpenStreetMap data and simulated dynamic traffic, the software framework calculates optimal routes on operational subgraphs in under 35 seconds, handles dynamic rerouting in under 20 seconds, and maintains over 90% adherence to physical and operational vehicle constraints.

Why it matters — Emergency dispatchers can now dynamically recalculate routes in response to changing traffic conditions while automatically respecting vehicle-specific operational limitations, a combination standard navigation engines fail to provide.

Caveat: System evaluation relied on simulated dynamic traffic scenarios rather than real-world emergency dispatch telemetry.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Hsuan-Chih Wang, Xianfeng Terry Yang
arXiv cs.AI

Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Air Traffic Management and Optimization · Aviation Industry Analysis and Trends · mobile phone data · United States · University of Maryland, College Park

A Two-Stage Hybrid Framework for Inferring Air Trips from Mobile Location-based Service (LBS) Data under Incomplete Airport Sightings

A two-stage hybrid framework infers U.S. domestic air travel from mobile location-based service (LBS) data by combining rule-based detection with a probabilistic model using spatial, temporal, and flight schedule constraints. Applied to January 2022 LBS records covering nearly 10 million users and 131 million sightings across the U.S., the method expanded air route coverage from 10.65% to 50.60% and raised the Spearman rank correlation against official T-100 flight benchmarks from 0.4490 to 0.7630.

Why it matters — By reconstructing passenger journeys even when device pings are missing at one or both airports, this approach allows planning agencies to track passenger demand across the vast majority of domestic flight corridors without relying on full airport trace continuity.

Caveat: Validation relies in part on a pseudo-ground-truth dataset constructed from the high-confidence trips identified during the first stage of the same pipeline.

arXiv · pdf

Still cited

Carlos Moreno, Zaheer Allam (2021), Introducing the “15-Minute City”: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic Cities 1 of today's items cite it · 62 of 3384 in the archive stand on it

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.