Month: March 2015

Edward Fok from FHWA at ITS

This coming Friday, March 6 there will be a seminar at the ITS Seminar room from 9:30 to 10:30 am featuring Edward Fok, from the Federal Highway Administration.

After the seminar, ITS students would be able to meet Edward Fok at the Student Conference room.

Drinking from the Advanced Transportation Firehose

This will be an overview of current development in urban transportation management technologies. I will describe some of the work begin done in predictive real-time operation, describe the goals of connected vehicle, examine some of connected vehicle’s impact of transportation operation, clearing the air between automated and autonomous vehicles, and discuss some possible impact of automation on transportation management. If I have time, I’ll also touch on some of the new challenges advanced transportation management systems are facing and could encounter in the future. The goal of this talk is to stimulate discussion and ideas where additional research will help.

Edward Fok is a Transportation Technology Specialist with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Technical Service/Resource Center. He helps public agencies apply advanced transportation systems and processes to solve mobility problems. He also helps researchers at Turner-Fairbanks and the Joint Program Office advance the state of the art in transportation operations. Ed is very active in many technical areas including Integrate Corridor Management, Connected Vehicles, Cyber Security, Automated Vehicles, and Advanced Freight Systems. Ed came to FHWA from the City of Los Angeles with 11 years of operations and research experiences and holds multiple professional engineering licenses.

Prof. Hani Mahmassani at ITS

On March 2nd Prof. Hani Mahamassani gave a seminar on:

Autonomous vehicles: Adoption Rates and Flow implications in mixed traffic streams.

We present a general conceptual framework to explore autonomous vehicle adoption. The traffic flow implications of different adoption rates are examined using a microscopic modeling framework of mixed traffic streams in which certain fractions of the vehicles are respectively autonomous, connected or both. We jointly model the properties of the peer-to- peer communication systems for different levels of message content. The framework is used in an exploratory analysis of the flow characteristics of the resulting mixed traffic stream, with particular attention to throughput and stability.

Professor Hani S. Mahmassani is the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation; Director, Northwestern University Transportation Center; Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; and Professor (courtesy), Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management. Professor Mahmassani specializes in multimodal transportation systems analysis, planning and operations, dynamic network modeling and optimization, transit network planning and design, dynamics of user behavior and telematics, telecommunication-transportation interactions, large- scale human infrastructure systems, and real-time operation of logistics and distribution systems.

After the talk, ITS students had the opportunity to meet Prof. Hani Mahamassani, and from the ITS Graduate Student Association, we would like to thank him for this opportunity and the insightful discussion we had.