Wednesday June 14th 2023 – Prof. Serge Hoogendorn – TU Delft
Title
Multi-scale modelling of active mode traffic and transportation: no data, no glory!
Abstract
As society increasingly recognizes the importance of active modes of travel and traffic in sustainable urban and multi-modal mobility, the scientific community is faced with a plethora of questions related to the design, planning, and operation of active mode mobility systems. However, until recently, the lack of data on active mode traffic and travel has limited the ability of researchers and practitioners to answer these questions. Fortunately, recent advances in data collection technology, the use of social data, and large-scale data collection efforts have transformed this field, enabling researchers to move away from the “assumption-rich and data-poor” situation of the past. These new data sources have led to novel insights, innovative models, and improved predictive and intervention capabilities.
This keynote provides an overview of recent insights and innovations in active mode traffic and transportation engineering. Drawing from empirical research, we will discuss topics such as the capacity drop for bicycle flows and self-organization phenomena in active mode traffic. We will also highlight novel multi-scale modelling frameworks, ranging from micro to network models, as well as integrated environments that use real-time data and predictive models for sensing, predicting, and intervening in active mode transportation systems. Our presentation will emphasize both the scientific and practical implications of these findings. We will discuss how these insights can inform the design and operation of active mode infrastructure, as well as support decision-making and interventions that improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of active mode transportation systems. Moreover, we will explore how a data-rich environment can inspire new directions for active mode research. We will discuss emerging topics such as the use of social data to gain insights into active mode travel behavior, and the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop more accurate and comprehensive models of active mode traffic.
Biography
Serge Hoogendoorn was appointed Antonie van Leeuwenhoek professor Traffic Operations and Management in 2006. He has been the chair of the department Transport and Planning since 2018. He is currently (one of the four) Distinguished Professor of Smart Urban Mobility at Delft University of Technology. Hoogendoorn is the PI Mobility in the Institute of Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (www.ams-amsterdam.com), a staff member of the TRAIL Research School on Transport and Logistics at DUT (www.rstrail.nl), and he chairs of the Network Management foundation (www.nm-magazine.nl). He is a member of the Royal Academcy of Sciences (KNAW), and director of the TU Delft | Transport & Mobility Institute.
Serge Hoogendoorn’s current research evolves around Smart Urban Mobility, with focal areas such as i) theory, modelling, and simulation of traffic and transportation networks, including cars, pedestrian, cyclists and novel public transport services (e.g. Demand Responsive Transit in combination with traditional PT); ii) development of methods for integrated management of these networks (regional network management, crowd and bicycle management; public transport operations); iii) impact of uncertainty of travel behaviour and network operations; iv) impact of ICT on network flow operations, robustness and resilience, and v) urban data and its applications. In all these topics, his work considers both recurrent and non-recurrent (emergency) situations. Hoogendoorn is one of very few academics who has been awarded personal grants in all the components of the Dutch NWO Vernieuwingsimpuls scheme: VENI, VIDI and VICI (NWO is the Netherlands National Science Foundation). In 2014, he was awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant (2.9 million Euros) for his ALLEGRO project on active mode mobility. Apart from that he has been awarded many scientific grants predominantly from NWO.
Thursday June 15th – Prof. Arnaud de la Fortelle – Mine Paris PSL / CTO & Co-Founder Heex Technologies
Title
Control and data in ITS: from Big Data to Smart Data
Abstract
Data is today very abundant in today’s intelligent transportation systems: sensory data alone may well be above the Petabyte/day, and processing (e.g. data fusion, perception algorithms) create even more. It appears only a small fraction of that data is necessary to learn from and control a system. In this talk, we would like to introduce current control techniques, for highly automated vehicles as well as transportation systems, with an emphasis on cooperation schemes. This insight into control techniques helps to focus on what is the really relevant data. This problem led to the creation of Heex Technologies. We will present the usefulness of the event-driven Smart Data for both tech providers (e.g. autonomous driving companies) and transportation authorities.
Biography
Dr. Arnaud de La Fortelle has engineer degrees from the French École Polytechnique and École des Ponts et Chaussées (2 top French institutions) and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (Probability Theory) prepared at Inria. He has been director of MINES Paris’ Center for Robotics (2008-2021). He was Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2017-2018. He is an elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Intelligent Transportation System Society. He has been member of several program committees for conferences and was General Chair of IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2019 in Paris (900 attendees). He was member, then president of the French ANR scientific evaluation committee for sustainable mobility and cities in 2008-2017. He serves regularly as expert for the European research programs (FP7, H2020, Horizon). In 2021, he took a full-time position as CTO at Heex Technologies while retaining a part-time position at MINES Paris. He co-founded this start-up company in 2019 and designed the technology behind Smart Data Management in a customer-oriented approach. Smart Data is a powerful way to address current and future Big Data limitations, especially needed for autonomous systems (Autonomous Driving, ADAS, Industry 4.0, Smart Cities…).
Friday June 16th 2023 – Prof. Jack Haddad – Technion University
Title
Traffic Flow of Urban Air Mobility: Modeling, Control, and Simulation
Abstract
In this talk, we will focus on traffic flow modeling, control, and simulation of urban air mobility. The imminent penetration of low-altitude passenger and delivery aircraft into the urban airspace will give rise to new urban air transport systems, which we call low-altitude air city transport (LAAT) systems. As the urban mobility revolution approaches, we must investigate (i) the individual and collective behavior of LAAT aircraft in cities, and (ii) ways of controlling LAAT systems. Future LAAT systems exemplify a new class of modern large scale engineering systems — networked control systems. They are spatially distributed, consist of many interconnected elements with control loops through digital communication networks such that the system signals can be exchanged among all components through a common network. Therefore, a decentralized controller design in framework of the unilateral event-driven paradigm is considered. Inspired by controlled urban road networks, in this talk we first establish the concept of Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) for LAAT systems and develop a collective and aggregate aircraft traffic flow model. Then, based on that, we design an adaptive boundary feedback flow control which is robust to various anomalies in technical devices and network communication links for LAAT systems.
Biography
Jack Haddad is an Associate Professor of Transportation Engineering with the Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the Head of the Technion Sustainable Mobility and Robust Transportation (T-SMART) Laboratory. He received all his degrees B.Sc. (2003), M.Sc. (2006), and Ph.D. (2010) in Transportation Engineering from the Technion. He served as a post-doctoral researcher (2010-2013) at the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS), EPFL, Switzerland. His current research interests include urban air mobility, autonomous vehicles, traffic flow modeling and control, large-scale complex networks, advanced transportation systems management, and public transportation.
Dr. Haddad serves as an Associate Editor for two journals: Transportation Research Part C and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He was a recipient of the European Union Marie Curie, Career Integration Grant (CIG), and a recipient of two Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grants. He is currently the head of the Technion Transportation Research Institute (TRI), and the Assistant to the Senior Executive Vice President for Equal Opportunities. He is also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google.