This paper investigates a project with stochastic activity durations and cash flows under discrete scenarios, where activities must satisfy precedence constraints generating cash inflows and outflows. The objective is to maximize expected net present value (NPV) by accelerating inflows and deferring outflows. We formulate the problem as a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) and propose a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) approach. Comparative experiments demonstrate that DDQN outperforms traditional rigid and dynamic strategies, particularly in large-scale or highly uncertain environments, exhibiting superior computational capability, policy reliability, and adaptability. Ablation studies further reveal that the dual-network architecture mitigates overestimation of action values, while the target network substantially improves training convergence and robustness. These results indicate that DDQN not only achieves higher expected NPV in complex project optimization but also provides a reliable framework for stable and effective policy implementation.

In Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS), Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are widely used to model complex data dependencies and inter-task communication. However, existing DAG scheduling approaches oversimplify data fusion tasks by assuming fixed triggering mechanisms, failing to capture the diverse fusion patterns found in real-world ADS software stacks. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing various fusion patterns and their performance implications in ADS. Our framework models three distinct fusion task types: timer-triggered, wait-for-all, and immediate fusion, which comprehensively represent real-world fusion behaviors. Our Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based approach enables an optimization of multiple real-time performance metrics, including reaction time, time disparity, age of information, and response time, while generating deterministic offline schedules directly applicable to real platforms. Evaluation using real-world ADS case studies, Raspberry Pi implementation, and randomly generated DAGs demonstrates that our framework handles diverse fusion patterns beyond the scope of existing work, and achieves substantial performance improvements in comparable scenarios.

This study examines the potential impact of reinforcement learning (RL)-enabled autonomous vehicles (AV) on urban traffic flow in a mixed traffic environment. We focus on a simplified day-to-day route choice problem in a multi-agent setting. We consider a city network where human drivers travel through their chosen routes to reach their destinations in minimum travel time. Then, we convert one-third of the population into AVs, which are RL agents employing Deep Q-learning algorithm. We define a set of optimization targets, or as we call them behaviors, namely selfish, collaborative, competitive, social, altruistic, and malicious. We impose a selected behavior on AVs through their rewards. We run our simulations using our in-house developed RL framework PARCOUR. Our simulations reveal that AVs optimize their travel times by up to 5\%, with varying impacts on human drivers' travel times depending on the AV behavior. In all cases where AVs adopt a self-serving behavior, they achieve shorter travel times than human drivers. Our findings highlight the complexity differences in learning tasks of each target behavior. We demonstrate that the multi-agent RL setting is applicable for collective routing on traffic networks, though their impact on coexisting parties greatly varies with the behaviors adopted.

Oddvar Kloster, Bjørnar Luteberget, Carlo Mannino, Giorgio SartorAbstract Optimization-based decision support systems have a significant potential to reduce delays, and thus improve efficiency on the railways, by automatically re-routing and re-scheduling trains after delays have occurred. The operations research community has dedicated a lot of effort to developing optimization algorithms for this problem, but each study is typically tightly connected with a specific industrial use case. Code and data are seldom shared publicly. This fact hinders reproducibility, and has led to a proliferation of papers describing algorithms for more or less compatible problem definitions, without any real opportunity for readers to assess their relative performance. Inspired by the successful communities around MILP, SAT, TSP, VRP, etc., we introduce a common problem definition and file format, DISPLIB, which captures all the main features of train re-routing and re-scheduling. We have gathered problem instances from multiple real-world use cases and made them openly available. In this paper, we describe the problem definition, the industrial instances, and a reference solver implementation. This allows any researcher or developer to work on the train dispatching problem without an industrial connection, and enables the research community to perform empirical comparisons between solvers.

We present a budget pacing feature called Smart Fast Finish (SFF). SFF builds upon the industry standard Fast Finish (FF) feature in budget pacing systems that depletes remaining advertising budget as quickly as possible towards the end of some fixed time period. SFF dynamically updates system parameters such as start time and throttle rate depending on historical ad-campaign data. SFF is currently in use at DoorDash, one of the largest delivery platforms in the US, and is part of its budget pacing system. We show via online budget-split experimentation data and offline simulations that SFF is a robust solution for overdelivery mitigation when pacing budget.

Interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) are major drivers of space weather disturbances, posing risks to both technological infrastructure and human activities. Automatic detection of ICMEs in solar wind in situ data is essential for early warning systems. While several methods have been proposed to identify these structures in time series data, robust real-time detection remains a significant challenge. In this work, we present ARCANE - the first framework explicitly designed for early ICME detection in streaming solar wind data under realistic operational constraints, enabling event identification without requiring observation of the full structure. Our approach evaluates the strengths and limitations of detection models by comparing a machine learning-based method to a threshold-based baseline. The ResUNet++ model, previously validated on science data, significantly outperforms the baseline, particularly in detecting high-impact events, while retaining solid performance on lower-impact cases. Notably, we find that using real-time solar wind (RTSW) data instead of high-resolution science data leads to only minimal performance degradation. Despite the challenges of operational settings, our detection pipeline achieves an F1-Score of 0.37, with an average detection delay of 24.5% of the event's duration while processing only a minimal portion of the event data. As more data becomes available, the performance increases significantly. These results mark a substantial step forward in automated space weather monitoring and lay the groundwork for enhanced real-time forecasting capabilities.

Organizations around the world schedule jobs (programs) regularly to perform various tasks dictated by their end users. With the major movement towards using a cloud computing infrastructure, our organization follows a hybrid approach with both cloud and on-prem servers. The objective of this work is to perform capacity planning, i.e., estimate resource requirements, and job scheduling for on-prem grid computing environments. A key contribution of our approach is handling uncertainty in both resource usage and duration of the jobs, a critical aspect in the finance industry where stochastic market conditions significantly influence job characteristics. For capacity planning and scheduling, we simultaneously balance two conflicting objectives: (a) minimize resource usage, and (b) provide high quality-of-service to the end users by completing jobs by their requested deadlines. We propose approximate approaches using deterministic estimators and pair sampling-based constraint programming. Our best approach (pair sampling-based) achieves much lower peak resource usage compared to manual scheduling without compromising on the quality-of-service.

Effective modern transportation systems depend critically on accurate Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) estimation. However, acquiring ground-truth SPaT information faces significant hurdles due to communication challenges with transportation departments and signal installers. As a result, Floating Car Data (FCD) has become the primary source for large-scale SPaT analyses. Current FCD approaches often simplify the problem by assuming fixed schedules and basic intersection designs for specific times and locations. These methods fail to account for periodic signal changes, diverse intersection structures, and the inherent limitations of real-world data, thus lacking a comprehensive framework that is universally applicable. Addressing this limitation, we propose an industrial-grade FCD analysis suite that manages the entire process, from initial data preprocessing to final SPaT estimation. Our approach estimates signal phases, identifies time-of-day (TOD) periods, and determines the durations of red and green lights. The framework's notable stability and robustness across diverse conditions, regardless of road geometry, is a key feature. Furthermore, we provide a cleaned, de-identified FCD dataset and supporting parameters to facilitate future research. Currently operational within our navigation platform, the system analyses over 15 million FCD records daily, supporting over two million traffic signals in mainland China, with more than 75\% of estimations demonstrating less than five seconds of error.

--Pre-timed traffic signal control, common ly used for operatin g signalized intersections and coordinated arterials, requires tedious manual work for signaling plan creating and updating. When the time -of -day or day -of -week plan s are utilized, one intersection is often associated with multiple plans, leading to further repetitive manual plan parameter inputting. To enable a user-friendly traffic signal control plan management process, this study proposes Chat2SPaT, a method to convert users' semi - structured and ambiguous descriptions on the signal control plan to exact signal phase and timing (SPaT) results, which could further be transformed into structured stage-based or ring -based plans to interact with intelligent transportation system (ITS) software and traffic signal controllers. With curated prompts, Chat2SPaT first leverages large language models' (LLMs) capability of understanding users' plan descriptions and reformulate the plan as a combination of phase sequence and phase attribute results in the json format. Based on LLM outputs, python scripts are designed to locate phases in a cycle, address nuances of traffic signal control, and finally assemble the complete traffic signal control plan. Within a chat, the pipeline can be utilized iteratively to conduct further plan editing. Experiments show that Chat2SPaT can generate plans with an accuracy of over 94% for both English and Chinese cases, using a test dataset with over 300 plan descriptions. As the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capability of understanding traffic signal control plan descriptions, Chat2SPaT provides an easy -to -use plan management pipeline for traffic practitioners and researchers, serving as a potential new building block for a more accurate and versatile application of LLMs in the field of ITS. The source codes, prompts and test dataset are openly accessible at https://github.com/yuewangits/Ch Index Terms --Large language model, traffic signal control, signal phase and timing, prompt engineering, intelligent transportation system. Yue Wang, Miao Zhou, Rui Zhuo and Chao Yi are with Zhejiang Dahua Technology Company Ltd., Hangzhou 310053, China (e -mail: wang.yue3@northeastern.edu; Guijing Huang is with Hangzhou AliCloud Apsara Information Technology Co., Ltd., Hangzhou 310000, China (huanggjcs@126.com Zhenliang Ma is with the KTH Roy al Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden (e -mail: zhenliang.ma21@gmail.com).

Event cameras are a novel type of sensor designed for capturing the dynamic changes of a scene. Due to factors such as trigger and transmission delays, a time offset exists in the data collected by multiple event cameras, leading to inaccurate information fusion. Thus, the collected data needs to be synchronized to overcome any potential time offset issue. Hardware synchronization methods require additional circuits, while certain models of event cameras (e.g., CeleX5) do not support hardware synchronization. Therefore, this paper proposes a hardware-free event camera synchronization method. This method determines differences between start times by minimizing the dissimilarity of the event density distributions of different event cameras and synchronizes the data by adjusting timestamps. The experiments demonstrate that the method's synchronization error is less than 10ms under various senses with multiple models of event cameras.