Meritxell Pacheco wins the XIII Abertis Prize for her Master's thesis
© 2016 EPFL
Meritxell Pacheco Paneque, PhD student at the Transport and Mobility Laboratory (TRANSP-OR, ENAC), has received the XIII Abertis Prize for Management of Transportation Infrastructures for her MSc thesis entitled "Traffic parameters estimations from the analysis of connected vehicles data", supervised by Professor Jaume Barceló and Associate Professor Lídia Montero at UPC.
This research was developed in inLab FIB, an innovation and research lab bed in the Barcelona School of Informatics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, with the support of Volkswagen AG.
In Meritxell’s thesis an experiment conducted in Barcelona with a small fleet of cooperative vehicles is described and analyzed. These vehicles are equipped with a set of radars that are able to identify the vehicles within their detection zone. The data they gathered was used to build and calibrate the emulation of these functionalities in a microscopic simulation model, which allowed to obtain fleet data on a large scale that goes far beyond what a reduced fleet of vehicles could capture. This data enabled to explore and evaluate methodological approaches for the estimation of the fundamental traffic variables, namely the flow, density and average speed, based on Edie’s definitions.
The Abertis-UPC Chair awards each year the best dissertations about the management of transportation infrastructures and services performed by students enrolled at Spanish universities. The Abertis-UPC Chair Prize consists of two categories: PhD thesis and shorter dissertations, end of degree project or Master’s thesis, which are endowed with €10,000 and €4,000 respectively. This edition has been the most successful in terms of candidacies in its 13 years of history. In total, 37 candidacies were submitted (17 for the PhD thesis category, and 20 for the shorter dissertation, end of degree project or Master’s thesis), the highest registered so far for both categories.
The Abertis-UPC Prize winners will take part in the V International Abertis Chair Prize that will be awarded in October in Santiago de Chile, among the pool of national winning projects of the International Abertis Chairs Network. This is nowadays active in Spain, France, Puerto Rico, Chile and Brazil, in collaboration with the following universities: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech (Barcelona, Spain); IFSTTAR, École des Ponts–ParisTech, Fondation des Ponts, (Paris, France); Puerto Rico University (San Juan, Puerto Rico); Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile) and São Paulo University (São Paulo, Brazil).