AI-Driven Time Series Modeling and Decision-Making in Urban Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Cities are dynamic systems whose evolution is increasingly observed through time-dependent data from transportation and mobility networks, environmental sensing, energy systems, urban infrastructure, and public services. These data provide valuable opportunities to understand urban dynamics, predict future conditions, and support informed decisions. At the same time, urban time series are often heterogeneous, non-stationary, incomplete, and strongly affected by spatial dependencies, changing environments, and human activities, posing fundamental challenges for reliable and generalizable modeling.

This Special Issue focuses on time series modeling and decision-making in urban systems. We welcome research on time series and spatio-temporal modeling for urban systems, including prediction, missing-data imputation, anomaly and event detection, and generative modeling and simulation. We are particularly interested in how such advances can inform urban planning, optimization, control, and decision-making. Both methodological advances and application-driven studies are encouraged.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Forecasting, imputation, anomaly and event detection, and generative modeling for urban time series;
• Representation learning, self-supervised learning, and foundation models for urban temporal data;
• Spatiotemporal, graph-based, multimodal, and causal modeling of urban dynamics;
• Cross-city transfer, domain adaptation, and online or continual learning under distribution shifts and concept drift;
• Robustness, uncertainty quantification, interpretability, and trustworthy time series modeling;
• Simulation, digital twins, and scenario-based modeling for urban planning and decision support;
• Optimization, control, and reinforcement learning for urban decision-making;
• Applications in transportation and mobility, environment and energy, infrastructure and public services, and urban planning.

We hope this Special Issue will bring together advances in time series modeling with their applications to understanding, predicting, and supporting decision-making in complex urban systems.

Dr. Yutong Xia
Dr. Yiji Zhao
Dr. Yishuo Jiang
Dr. Bin Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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