Throughout the fall of 2009, Transportation@MIT will hold a weekly seminar series on Tuesdays from 4:00-5:00PM to highlight current MIT research to MIT faculty, staff, and students. Our aim is to strengthen the community of transportation researchers at the Institute, and to build networks among MIT’s transportation researchers to facilitate and initiate future collaborations. People from the external community are also welcome.
Beginning September 22, all lectures will be held in MIT 32-124 from 4:00-5:00PM. (The October 27 lecture will be held in 32-144.)
December 1 Algorithmic Game Theory and Transportation: A Survey Andreas Schulz, Patrick McGovern Professor of Mathematics of Operations Research, Head of Operations Research and Statistics Group at the Sloan School of Management
Nash equilibria and related game-theoretic concepts have lately received increasing attention from the algorithms community. The “price of anarchy” has emerged as the perhaps most prominent notion. It measures the loss of efficiency in a system that is left to independent, selfishly acting agents if compared to a globally optimal, centrally coordinated solution. While this view is now used in a variety of settings including location analysis, pricing, supply chain coordination, and system design, it was originally developed in the context of transportation networks. In this lecture, I will review results on the price of anarchy and closely related concepts that have since been established in a series of papers on selfish routing in multi-commodity flow networks.
Past speakers:
September 15
An Introduction to Transportation@MIT
Cindy Barnhart, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, Director of Transportation@MIT, Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic Affairs
See a copy of Prof. Barnhart's presentation, or watch the video.
September 22
Opportunities for Reducing U.S. Transportation's Petroleum Usage and GHG Emissions
John Heywood, Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and Director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory
People mobility, largely in private vehicles, is the major source of U.S. transportation's greenhouse gas emissions, followed by emissions from freight and air travel. All transport modes are totally dependent on petroleum-based fuels. Thus, reducing petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions significantly is a major challenge. The scale of our transportation's system dictates that for the next couple of decades improvements in mainstream powertrain and vehicle technologies, along with modest amounts of alternative fuels, will have the greatest impact. Longer-term we will need to transform the way we "energize" our various transportation systems if we are to clean and green it to the extent our climate change scientists are calling for. This seminar will attempt to frame a discussion of these bigger issues as well as review the types of transportation energy analysis that Professor Heywood and his team of students are working on.
See a copy of Prof. Heywood's presentation, or watch the video.
September 29
The Role of Information Technology in Improving Transit Systems
Nigel Wilson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Improving performance of computers and communications technologies are now starting to have a significant impact on the urban public transport industry. Automatic data collection systems including automatic vehicle location systems, automatic passenger counting systems, advanced passenger information systems and electronic fare payment and ticketing systems are becoming ubiquitous in large systems and are having an impact on the quality and availability of information for service and operations planning, controlling the service and measuring the resultant service quality delivered to passengers. While the impacts of these advances are already apparent in many systems, there is the potential for much deeper impact in the future. Technology continues to improve across the board and will offer opportunities to develop and apply more ambitious models to assist in many facets of the performance of public transport systems. Traditional models of the inter-relationships between service planning, operations control and passenger information, for example, have been based largely on the independence of these functions one from another. So the service plan has largely driven both the operations control and passenger information functions in most operating agencies, simplifying these aspects of the system. In the future, public transport systems may be able to take advantage of improved information and better communication between operating personnel, agency managers and passengers which will enable a rethinking of these inter-relationships. This seminar will examine current public transport industry practice in this arena and discuss the potential for future enhancement of these individual public transport agency functions as well as their inter-relationships.
See a copy of Prof. Wilson's presentation, or watch the video.
October 6
The Role of Information Technology in Improving Transit Systems
Hari Balakrishnan, Professor Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of CSAIL
Road traffic is a "grand challenge" societal problem, and with the increasing crowding of the areas in and around cities, it is only becoming worse. With the proliferation of wireless connectivity, smartphones, and cheap embedded computers, it is now possible to continuously monitor urban areas using mobile sensors carried by people while they drive. This talk describes three challenges that need to be met in using such data to help people reduce the time and fuel spent stuck in traffic: 1) accurate modeling of traffic delays while conserving energy and protecting user privacy, 2) accurate predictions of future traffic conditions, and 3) traffic-aware routing to provide credible routes to users. We will discuss and demonstrate how the CarTel system addresses these problems. More information on Professor Balakrishnan’s joint work with the CarTel project team can be found at http://cartel.csail.mit.edu.
Please watch the video of Professor Balakrishnan's presentation.
October 20
Alice in Wonderland and the Cheshire Cat: Which Way Are We Going, and Does it Matter? Thinking Globally, Acting Locally, and Walking the Talk
Fred Salvucci, is a civil engineer specializing in transportation, in particular infrastructure, urban transportation, public transportation and institutional development in decision-making. He was the Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Governor Dukakis. He is a Senior Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The focus on fixing the vehicle through CAFE standards, the California Car, and Cash for Clunkers still leaves us moving in the wrong direction on congestion and climate change. Much of the operations research focused ITS is about who gets to the jump to the head of the line, or is too small to matter. We need to achieve a significant shift away from auto dependency.
The local challenge of coping with a 30% reduction in auto capacity crossing the Charles River due to bridge reconstruction can be an opportunity for a significant mode shift away from the single occupant auto, and towards sustainability, with national implications. MIT can uniquely provide both relevant research and leadership if we focus our efforts on sustainable transportation through the Transportation@MIT Initiative.
See a copy of Fred Salvucci's presentation, or watch the video.
October 27
Carbon and Energy Efficient Supply Chains
Edgar Blanco, Research Director at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics
On this presentation we will discuss the relevance, the key challenges and some approaches for measuring the energy & carbon footprint of supply chains. We will discuss the relationship with traditional supply chain objectives and some case studies on the impact on designing logistic systems. We will also illustrate how public-private partnerships could be used to overcome some of these challenges, by aligning multiple incentives, increase transparency and collaboration within the supply chain.
Watch the video below of Edgar Blanco's presentation.
November 3
Network-Driven Transportation
Li-Shiuan Peh, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
With Moore's Law scaling, we can already build chips with billions of transistors today. Mobile devices of the future will have compute power equivalent to today's large servers in data centers. Combine that with rapid advances in pervasive wireless networking, we envision these mobile devices forming a collaborative computing fabric. With powerful devices on pedestrians, vehicles, and infrastructure, transportation in the future can leverage such a fabric for round-the-clock, pervasive, real-time sensing, computing and control. This talk will discuss how such a fabric can enable next-generation transportation services, before diving in on the systems challenges in building a collaborative computing fabric, and describing potential solutions we are working on.
Upcoming speakers...
December 8
Autonomous Vehicles and Urban Mobility Emilio Frazzoli, Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
