Real-Time Forecasting of Dockless Scooter-Sharing Demand: A Spatio-Temporal Multi-Graph Transformer Approach

Accurately forecasting the real-time travel demand for dockless scooter-sharing is crucial for the planning and operations of transportation systems. Deep learning models provide researchers with powerful tools to achieve this task, but research in this area is still lacking. This paper thus proposes a novel deep learning architecture named Spatio-Temporal Multi-Graph Transformer (STMGT) to forecast the real-time spatiotemporal dockless scooter-sharing demand. The proposed model uses a graph convolutional network (GCN) based on adjacency graph, functional similarity graph, demographic similarity graph, and transportation supply similarity graph to attach spatial dependency to temporal input (i.e., historical demand). The output of GCN is subsequently processed with weather condition information by the Transformer to capture temporal dependency. Then, a convolutional layer is used to generate the final prediction. The proposed model is evaluated for two real-world case studies in Washington, D.C. and Austin, TX, respectively, and the results show that for both case studies, STMGT significantly outperforms all the selected benchmark models, and the most important model component is the weather information. The proposed model can help the micromobility operators develop optimal vehicle rebalancing schemes and guide cities to better manage dockless scooter-sharing operations.