Enabling Next Generation Logistics and Planning for Smarter Societies

Abstract: Social media has revolutionized our societies. It has made fundamental impact on the way we work and live. More importantly, social media is gradually becoming a key pulse of smart societies by sensing the information about the people and their spatio-temporal experiences around the living spaces. Big data and computational intelligence technologies are helping us to manage and analyze large amounts of data generated by the social media, such as twitter, and make informed decisions about us and the living spaces. This paper reports our preliminary work on the use of social media for the detection of spatio-temporal events related to logistics and planning. Specifically, we use big data and AI platforms including Hadoop, Spark, and Tableau, to study twitter data about London. Moreover, we use the Google Maps Geocoding API to locate the tweeters and make additional analysis. We find and locate congestion around the London city. We also discover that, during a certain period, top third tweeted words were about job and hiring, leading us to locate the source of the tweets which happened to be originating from around the Canary Wharf area, UK's major financial center. The results presented in the paper have been obtained using 500,000 tweets.