Incorporating LSTM Auto-Encoders in Optimizations to Solve Parking Officer Patrolling Problem

The smart parking system is one of the most important problems in smart cities. Recently, an increasing number of sensors installed in parking spaces have provided big spatio-temporal data that be used to analyze parking situations in the city and help parking officers monitor parking violations. The traveling officer problem was customized to formulate a path-finding problem that aims to maximize the probability of catching overstayed cars before they leave. One of the challenges is to extract effective features from the big spatio-temporal data and provide a data-driven solution to replace conventional solutions such as a simple rule-based system or single optimization methods. In this article, we propose a seamless end-to-end learning and optimization framework that combines the long short-term memory auto-encoder neural network, clustering, and path-finding methods to solve the traveling officer problem. Our extensive comparison experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset have shown that our proposed solution outperforms any other single-step or optimization methods.