PEOPLE. LUCA SCHENATO. HYCON2.

Markos Papageorgiou

Department of Production Engineering and Managament

Technical University of Crete, Greece

Abstract:

Daily traffic congestion on urban road and motorway networks around the world continues to increase, with detrimental effects on travel times, traffic safety, fuel consumption and environmental pollution. The annual cost of traffic congestion on European roads is estimated to approach 100 b€ or 1% of the GDP. Traffic congestion is only partly due to high demand, since the appearing congestion degrades the expensive infrastructure capacity essentially at the only times it is actually needed, i.e. during the daily peak periods. Traffic control measures, if properly designed and deployed, may lead to substantial savings of travel time, fuel consumption and environmental impact, along with an improvement of traffic safety. The presentation will outline the related traffic control problems and methods, with a focus on practicable results. More specifically, the areas of urban signal control; motorway traffic control (local and coordinated ramp metering, variable speed limit control, mainstream traffic flow control); merging traffic control; and route information and guidance will be addressed, along with the presentation of some selected field results.

Biography:

Markos Papageorgiou received the Diplom-Ingenieur and Doktor-Ingenieur (honors) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1976 and 1981, respectively. He was a Free Associate with Dorsch Consult, Munich (1982-1988), and with Institute National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Sécurité (INRETS), Arcueil, France (1986-1988). From 1988 to 1994 he was a Professor of Automation at the Technical University of Munich. Since 1994 he has been a Professor at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. He was a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1982), at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris (1985-1987), and at MIT, Cambridge (1997, 2000); and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (1993, 1997, 2001, 2011) and other universities. Dr. Papageorgiou is author or editor of 4 books and of some 400 technical papers. His research interests include automatic control and optimisation theory and applications to traffic and transportation systems, water systems and further areas. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research – Part C. He also served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Control Systems Society – Conference Editorial Board, of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and other journals. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He received a DAAD scholarship (1971-1976), the 1983 Eugen-Hartmann award from the Union of German Engineers (VDI), and a Fulbright Lecturing/Research Award (1997). He was a recipient of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award (2007) and of the IEEE Control Systems Society Transition to Practice Award (2010). He was presented the title of Visiting Professor by the University of Belgrade, Serbia (2010). The Dynamic Systems and Simulation Laboratory he has been heading since 1994, received the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society ITS Institutional Lead Award (2011).

Giacomo Como

Department of Automatic Control Lund University, Sweeden Abstract: As transportation demand is fast approaching its infrastructure capacity, a rigorous understanding of the relationship between the dynamical properties of transportation networks and realistic driver route choice behavior in response to the available information is attracting large research interest. Such an analysis is essential, among other things, for appropriate design of incentives influencing drivers’ behavior in order to induce a desired socially optimal usage of the transportation infrastructure. A particularly relevant issue is the network behavior in response to unexpected disruptions, which have the potential to spread and be amplified by the network dynamics, and possibly lead the system to global collapse. In this talk, we consider dynamical models of transportation networks in which the drivers’ route choices are influenced by information at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The considered models involve a continuum flow of drivers commuting between a common origin/destination pair. The drivers' route choices are affected by their, relatively infrequent, perturbed best responses to global information about the current network congestion levels, as well as their instantaneous local observation of the immediate surroundings as they transit through the network. The drivers’ route choice behavior is characterized by their preference toward globally less congested paths as well as myopic decisions in favor of locally less congested paths. The simultaneous evolution of the traffic congestion on the network and of the aggregate path preference is modeled by a system of coupled ordinary differential equations. First, we analyze stability of this system showing that, if the frequency of updates of path preferences is sufficiently small as compared to the frequency of the traffic flow dynamics, then the state of the transportation network ultimately approaches a neighborhood of the Wardrop equilibrium, i.e., a configuration in which the delay associated to any source-destination path chosen by a nonzero fraction of drivers does not exceed the delay associated to any other path. Then, we study robustness properties of the fast-scale distributed routing dynamics. In particular, we characterize the margin of resilience of such dynamical transportation networks, defined as the minimum sum of link-wise flow capacity reductions that make the system unstable. Our analysis suggests a simple convex cost to be used when optimizing equilibrium flows of the unperturbed transportation network using tolls. Finally, we study a variation of the above dynamical transportation network model, which allows for cascaded failures and analyze the network resilience properties in this setting. Biography: Giacomo Como received the B.Sc., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2002, 2004, and 2008, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden. During 2006–2007, he was a Visiting Assistant in Research with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University. From 2008 to 2011, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research interests include the mathematics of control and information theory, and dynamical systems over networks.