By Francis Wong
Dr. R. Jayakrishnan is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine. He has been with UCI since 1991 after earning his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on transportation systems engineering, particularly in areas like traffic flow theory, dynamic traffic assignment, network modeling, and intelligent transportation systems. He is also known for his work on real-time traffic simulation and advanced transit systems.
Professor Jayakrishnan’s Ph.D. work in the 1980s focused on the development of early guidance systems and intelligent transportation networks aimed at reducing traffic congestion by rerouting vehicles. His research was a precursor to modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), emerging before the advent of GPS technology and digital maps. At the time, maps were not digitized, and real-time traffic information systems were non-existent. The research was groundbreaking, as it was one of the first Ph.D. works in the world to address smart transportation systems. The concepts explored during this period eventually paved the way for real-time traffic management tools and GPS-enabled devices, which became widely used two decades later, especially as GPS technology became available for civilian use after President Clinton’s decision to make high-precision GPS accessible in 2000. This availability of navigation maps for driving made people more inclined to use cell phones, and the ecosystem related to transportation took off. His work in the 1990s was ahead of its time, and the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCI was the world’s first testbed for traffic studies. Acting as a sandbox for researchers, it had all of Orange County’s freeway data and Irvine city’s street data coming to UCI by the mid-1990s, in a multi-million dollar effort by Caltrans. It was the first university group to have real-time information from highways.
Around the 2000s, the research focus shifted to the earliest versions of shared mobility and the shared economy, concepts that gained significant momentum in the past 15 years. Shared mobility refers to transportation services where vehicles, bikes, or scooters are shared among users, reducing the need for individual ownership. The shared economy involves peer-to-peer services and resource sharing, often facilitated by technology platforms, which allow people to rent or share assets such as cars or homes. “Fifteen years ago, no one was talking about the shared economy,” Professor Jayakrishnan says. “Well before that, in the late 1990s, we had already developed the concept of high-coverage point-to-point transit, introducing the idea of both pick-up and payment occurring within the same vehicle.” People were able to be picked up and dropped off separately as passengers, and it was a mass transit system based on shared movements. Later, he developed newer ideas for the future, such as peer-to-peer payment among travelers. His current research is in developing innovative designs that leverage on vehicle connectivity, such as traffic intersections without signals.
Professor Jayakrishnan has made significant contributions to the transportation field, with over 125 refereed publications and numerous awards. He has supervised 30 Ph.D. graduates, many of whom have gone on to faculty positions in universities worldwide.
Photo caption: Portrait of Dr. R. Jayakrishnan