Routing and Scheduling Optimization for Urban Air Mobility Fleet Management using Quantum Annealing

The growing integration of urban air mobility (UAM) for urban transportation and delivery has accelerated due to increasing traffic congestion and its environmental and economic repercussions. Efficiently managing the anticipated high-density air traffic in cities is critical to ensure safe and effective operations. In this study, we propose a routing and scheduling framework to address the needs of a large fleet of UAM vehicles operating in urban areas. Using mathematical optimization techniques, we plan efficient and deconflicted routes for a fleet of vehicles. Formulating route planning as a maximum weighted independent set problem enables us to utilize various algorithms and specialized optimization hardware, such as quantum annealers, which has seen substantial progress in recent years. Our method is validated using a traffic management simulator tailored for the airspace in Singapore. Our approach enhances airspace utilization by distributing traffic throughout a region. This study broadens the potential applications of optimization techniques in UAM traffic management.

Mitigating Voter Attribute Bias for Fair Opinion Aggregation

The aggregation of multiple opinions plays a crucial role in decision-making, such as in hiring and loan review, and in labeling data for supervised learning. Although majority voting and existing opinion aggregation models are effective for simple tasks, they are inappropriate for tasks without objectively true labels in which disagreements may occur. In particular, when voter attributes such as gender or race introduce bias into opinions, the aggregation results may vary depending on the composition of voter attributes. A balanced group of voters is desirable for fair aggregation results but may be difficult to prepare. In this study, we consider methods to achieve fair opinion aggregation based on voter attributes and evaluate the fairness of the aggregated results. To this end, we consider an approach that combines opinion aggregation models such as majority voting and the Dawid and Skene model (D&S model) with fairness options such as sample weighting. To evaluate the fairness of opinion aggregation, probabilistic soft labels are preferred over discrete class labels. First, we address the problem of soft label estimation without considering voter attributes and identify some issues with the D&S model. To address these limitations, we propose a new Soft D&S model with improved accuracy in estimating soft labels. Moreover, we evaluated the fairness of an opinion aggregation model, including Soft D&S, in combination with different fairness options using synthetic and semi-synthetic data. The experimental results suggest that the combination of Soft D&S and data splitting as a fairness option is effective for dense data, whereas weighted majority voting is effective for sparse data. These findings should prove particularly valuable in supporting decision-making by human and machine-learning models with balanced opinion aggregation.

Mitigating Observation Biases in Crowdsourced Label Aggregation

Crowdsourcing has been widely used to efficiently obtain labeled datasets for supervised learning from large numbers of human resources at low cost. However, one of the technical challenges in obtaining high-quality results from crowdsourcing is dealing with the variability and bias caused by the fact that it is humans execute the work, and various studies have addressed this issue to improve the quality by integrating redundantly collected responses. In this study, we focus on the observation bias in crowdsourcing. Variations in the frequency of worker responses and the complexity of tasks occur, which may affect the aggregation results when they are correlated with the quality of the responses. We also propose statistical aggregation methods for crowdsourcing responses that are combined with an observational data bias removal method used in causal inference. Through experiments using both synthetic and real datasets with/without artificially injected spam and colluding workers, we verify that the proposed method improves the aggregation accuracy in the presence of strong observation biases and robustness to both spam and colluding workers.