Speaker：Dr.Wei-Hua Lin

Title：Towards the Interaction of Individual Vehicles and Traffic Control: A Voting-Based Approach

Time：Dec.13th 14:00 -16:00

Venue：Room A322 An-zhong Building 

Presentation Abstract:

Vehicles, especially commercial ones, have long been utilized as probes to generate traffic information. For this research, we will take one step further to incorporate individual vehicle data into traffic control, in hope that they will gradually replace the role of the existing traffic surveillance systems as the primary source of traffic data. To prepare for such a paradigm shift, one needs to overcome some key institutional barrier, in particular, the privacy issue. A Highway Voting System (HVS) is proposed to address this issue in which drivers provide link- and/or path-based vehicle data to the traffic management system in the form of "votes" in exchange for possible favorable service from traffic control. The proposed HVS offers a platform that links data from individual vehicles directly with traffic control. In the system, traffic control responds to voting vehicles in a way similar to the current system responding to priority vehicles and providing the requested services accordingly. Strategies to entice drivers into "voting" so as to increase the market penetration level under all traffic conditions are discussed. Examples are given to demonstrate the impact of the proposed system on algorithm development and traffic control.

Brief Bio:

Dr. Wei-Hua Lin is an associate professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from University of California at Berkeley in 1995. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the PATH program of the University of California at Berkeley.  He is the past paper review coordinator for the Intelligent Transportation Systems Committee of Transportation Research Board. He is currently the associate editor of IEEE Transaction on Intelligent Transportation Systems.  He is the author/coauthor of over 70 papers.  His research area covers traffic control,  logistics systems analysis, and network optimization.