Speaker：Satish V. Ukkusuri, Professor of Lyles School of Civil Engineering at the Purdue University, USA.
Title1：Connected Travelers: A Model for Dynamic Speed Limit for Mobility and Sustainability Goals
Date：Apr.25th 2016, 10:00 A.M.
Location：A322, Anzhong Building
Presentation Abstracts:
Connected vehicles and self-driving cars are fast becoming a reality. There are specific challenges in the connected vehicle environment that should be addressed to improve the operational performance of transportation systems. This talk will discuss a novel dynamic speed limit control model accounting for uncertain traffic demand and supply in a stochastic traffic network. First, a link based dynamic network loading model is developed to simulate the traffic flow propagation allowing the change of speed limits. Shockwave propagation is well defined and captured by checking the difference between the queue forming end and the dissipation end. Second, the dynamic speed limit problem is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and solved by a real time control mechanism. The speed limit controller is modeled as an intelligent agent interacting with the stochastic network environment stochastic network environment to assign time dependent link based speed limits. Based on different metrics, e.g. total network throughput, delay time, vehicular emissions are optimized in the modeling framework, the optimal speed limit scheme is obtained by applying the R-Markov Average Reward Technique (R-MART) based reinforcement learning algorithm. A case study of the Sioux Falls network is constructed to test the performance of the model. Results show that the total travel time and emissions (in terms of CO) are reduced by around 18% and 20% compared with the base case of non-speed limit control.
Title2：Big Data in Transportation: Emerging Ideas and A Summary of Research Projects
Date：Apr.27th 2016, 10:00 A.M.
Location：A322, Anzhong Building
Presentation Abstracts: 
 Over the last several years many private and public sector agencies have been interested in how data, social media, mobile technologies, and data visualization can help us manage our urban environments. IBM has coined the term “Smart Cities” to describe the recent development in this area, while CISCO calls it as “Intelligent Cities”. This talk with present ongoing research on how very large scale data analytics is (re) shaping the solution to transportation mobility issues. This talk will discuss the speaker’s experience with geo-location data from Foursquare and Twitter can be used to characterize and predict activity patterns in an urban area. In addition, other data sets such as taxi cab GPS data, camera data and urban transit data will be discussed to demonstrate the potential for predicting network state and travel time using sample data sets collected at the Interdisciplinary Network Modeling Research group at Purdue University. Key methodological issues related to dynamic games and machine-learning approaches will be briefly discussed.
About the speaker:
Dr. Satish V. Ukkusuri is a Professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University where he teaches courses in transportation systems and freight and logistics planning. Dr. Ukkusuri is a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure group at Purdue. Dr. Ukkusuri is a co-lead of the Building Sustainable Communities cluster hire at Purdue University with a goal of hiring seven faculty in this interdisciplinary area.
Dr. Ukkusuri is recognized nationally and internationally in the area of transportation network modeling, ITS, big data and disaster management. He leads the Interdisciplinary Transportation Modeling and Analytics Lab at Purdue. His current areas of interest include: complex network modeling, coupled systems modeling, network resilience, big data analytics for transportation systems, dynamic traffic modeling, innovative signal control algorithms, connected vehicle environment, behavioral issues in natural hazards such as hurricanes, evacuation modeling, modeling transportation sustainability policies such as cap and trade, emissions pricing etc, sustainable freight logistics and safety modeling.
Dr. Ukkusuri has published more than 200 peer reviewed journal and conference papers. Dr. Ukkusuri received the 2005 SWUTC Robert Herman Award given for outstanding research and leadership in transportation. He also received the Blitman Endowed Chair Professorship during his tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from August 2005 - August 2009. He received the CP-STIO Award from Government of India and the 2007 Emerging Scholars Grant from UTRC. In 2011, Dr. Ukkusuri received the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Award given for “outstanding research and leadership by a new faculty member in the United States”. He was a Discovery Park Research Scholar from Jan 2013-Dec 2014. Currently, he is a Fulbright Innovation award winner in 2015-16 and a High End Foreign Expert to the Government of China.
Dr. Ukkusuri is a member of the Transportation Network Modeling committee at Transportation Research Board (National Academies). Dr. Ukkusuri is an Area Editor for the journal, Networks and Spatial Economics, Academic Editor for PLOS One and an Associate Editor for Transportmetrica Part B. He is on the Editorial Advisor Board of Transportation Research Part-B and Transportation Research Part-C and was the Editor of overview papers for the journal of Transportation Research Part-C (Emerging Technologies) from January 2008-December 2011.