Spatiotemporal critical opportunity and link identification for joint participation scheduling

Abstract

Individuals commonly participate in work activities, social activities, and cultural events. Joint participation is an essential part of individuals’ social activities. How to schedule spatiotemporal activities for social communication comfortably is a key issue for human beings. To address this question, modern information and telecommunication technologies provide diverse communication approaches to help decision-making in activity scheduling. For example, these technologies have been integrated to facilitate an activity-based location-based service (LBS) for travelers, such as advanced traveler information systems (Ben-Elia and Shiftan 2010) or infectious disease control (Angulo et al. 2012). Normally, to schedule comfortable and acceptable joint participation, an LBS needs to identify critical opportunities and links among travelers based on cost considerations like travel distance and time, congestion, and others.