GUtech professor receives national research award for addressing transportation services redundancy

Prof. Dr. Nafaa Jabeur, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at GUtech, alongside co-researchers from Dhofar University, has received the National Research Award during the seventh cycle of the Annual Research Forum organised by the Research and Innovation Sector of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MoHERI).

Dr. Nafaa and his colleagues’ paper, “Transportation Service Redundancy from a Spatio-Temporal Perspective” won in the Information Systems and Communication Technologies field.

The winning research addresses the mismatch between demand and supply for taxi services in big cities. Dr. Nafaa explained that: “To address this discrepancy, we used the concept of service redundancy. More specifically, we modelled citywide taxi service redundancy as an explicit spatio-temporal phenomenon. We deployed Machine Learning techniques to qualify this redundancy in space and time. We proposed an agent-based collaborative scheme for the calculation, collection, and control of service redundancy at three different levels: namely micro level (service redundancy at the immediate surroundings of individual taxis), meso level (redundancy at taxi operators’ level), and macro level (service redundancy at a city level).” “Taxi operators are relying on several strategies to optimize the commutes of their fleets through the cities, without being successful in avoiding long empty-cruise time as well as considerable waste of fuel.” The results of the “intensive simulation experiments showed a significant decrease of imbalance in city-wide transportation supply-demand as well as a better trade-off between customers’ satisfaction and taxis’ profits,” he added.

Prof. Nafaa holds a PhD in Computer Science from Laval University in Canada. He has been working at GUtech since 2013. Prof. Nafaa is also GUtech’s Director of Research. His research interest includes sensor web, sensor networks, and wireless sensor networks; cyber-physical systems.

(c) Text: GUtech/ Fatima El Madkouri & Prof. Dr. Nafaa Jabeur