Mobility Award winner November 2016

The goal of my PhD research project is to investigate how congestion evolves that can contribute in efficient traffic management techniques to improve cities’ mobility. Unpredictability of travel behavior and high complexity of accurate physical modeling have challenged researchers to develop realistic microscopic level models that are able to replicate congestion spreading and growth in large traffic networks. Recent research has shown the existence of well-defined Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams relating average flow and density in homogeneous networks. The aim of my thesis is to develop clustering methods to partition heterogeneous networks into connected homogeneous regions and design real-time traffic control schemes to postpone congestion. At the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Urbana, USA), Prof. Yanfeng Ouyang and his research group is working on transportation networks and traffic flow operations to logistics systems, supply chains and optimization. The opportunity of working with a research group that counts with many years of research activity in operation research and logistics will help me receive treasured feedbacks related to mathematical formulation of clustering problem and finalize my research work on it. Moreover, it provides me a good experience to see the application of the derived clustering and control methods in other real problems (e.g. complex facility location, Dial a ride problem, etc.), which gives me an additional boost in my academic path.