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The operation and management of the metro system in urban areas rely on accurate predictions of future passenger flow. While using all the available information can potentially improve on the accuracy of the flow prediction, there has been little attention to the hierarchical relationship between the type of tickets collected from the passengers entering/exiting a station and its resulting passenger flow. To this end, we propose a novel Integrative Prediction Framework with the Hierarchical Message-Passing Graph Neural Network (IPF-HMGNN). The proposed framework consists of three components: initial prediction, task judgment and hierarchical coordination modules. Using the Wuxi, China metro network as an example, we study two prediction approaches (i) traditional prediction approach where the model directly predicts passenger flow at the station, and (ii) hierarchical prediction approach where the prediction of ticket type and station passenger flow are performed simultaneously considering the hierarchical constraints (i.e., the sum of predicted passenger flow per ticket type equals the predicted station aggregated passenger flow). Experimental results indicate that in the traditional prediction approach, our IPF-HMGNN can significantly reduce the mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of the GNN prediction model by 49.56% and 53.88%, respectively. In the hierarchical prediction approach, IPF-HMGNN can achieve a maximum reduction of 35.32% in MAE and 36.18% in RMSE, while satisfying the hierarchical constraint.

Metro operation management relies on accurate predictions of passenger flow in the future. This study begins by integrating cross-city (including source and target city) knowledge and developing a short-term passenger flow prediction framework (METcross) for the metro. Firstly, we propose a basic framework for modeling cross-city metro passenger flow prediction from the perspectives of data fusion and transfer learning. Secondly, METcross framework is designed to use both static and dynamic covariates as inputs, including economy and weather, that help characterize station passenger flow features. This framework consists of two steps: pre-training on the source city and fine-tuning on the target city. During pre-training, data from the source city trains the feature extraction and passenger flow prediction models. Fine-tuning on the target city involves using the source city's trained model as the initial parameter and fusing the feature embeddings of both cities to obtain the passenger flow prediction results. Finally, we tested the basic prediction framework and METcross framework on the metro networks of Wuxi and Chongqing to experimentally analyze their efficacy. Results indicate that the METcross framework performs better than the basic framework and can reduce the Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error by 22.35% and 26.18%, respectively, compared to single-city prediction models.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials offer opportunities to explore both fundamental science and applications in the limit of atomic thickness. Beyond the prototypical case of graphene, other 2D materials have recently come to the fore. Of particular technological interest are 2D semiconductors, of which the family of materials known as the group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) has attracted much attention. The presence of a bandgap allows for the fabrication of high on-off ratio transistors and optoelectronic devices, as well as valley/spin polarized transport. The technique of chemical vapour deposition (CVD) has produced high-quality and contiguous wafer-scale 2D films, however, they often need to be transferred to arbitrary substrates for further investigation. In this Review, the various transfer techniques developed for transferring 2D films will be outlined and compared, with particular emphasis given to CVD-grown TMDs. Each technique suffers undesirable process-related drawbacks such as bubbles, residue or wrinkles, which can degrade device performance by for instance reducing electron mobility. This Review aims to address these problems and provide a systematic overview of key methods to characterize and improve the quality of the transferred films and heterostructures. With the maturing technological status of CVD-grown 2D materials, a robust transfer toolbox is vital., Comment: 67 pages, 18 figures, Review paper