Nikolaos Geroliminis: Modeling & controlling traffic congestion
© 2013 EPFL
The excellence of the research performed at EPFL has once again been recognized at an international level. Nikolas Geroliminis, Director of Urban Transport Systems Laboratory at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded a STARTING GRANT 2013 from the European Research Council (ERC).
Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks
As cities around the world grow rapidly and more people through different modes compete for limited urban road infrastructure to travel, it is important to this space can be manage this space to improve accessibility for travelers. This ERC project targets to operate traffic in future cities in a holistic way that was not possible until now. It tackles the problem of modeling and optimization in large-scale congested traffic networks with an aggregated realistic representation of traffic dynamics and route choice and multiple modes of transport. Mobility will advance through the integration of big data, the understanding of multimodal patterns, the coordination and optimization of urban efficiency and sustainability for the travel of people and goods. This is challenging because cities are highly complex systems. Nevertheless, cities are becoming smarter in ways that enable us to monitor, analyze and improve the quality of life in real time. ‘Big mobility data’ provides a unique social observatory that can help us understand how congestion develops and evolves, and discover hidden patterns and identify models that can contribute in efficient traffic management techniques to improve cities’ mobility and accessibility. Congestion governance in urban systems is currently fragmented and uncoordinated and traditional approaches use more detailed models with a higher degree of unpredictability and complexity that cannot be solved in real time. This is a highly motivated problem both because of the socio-economic influence of congestion and the challenges embedded in the optimization framework and the modeling aspects. Our recent research shows that by developing realistic network based aggregated models of congestion we don’t need to know the exact position of every particle in a city and all parameters of our models are observable quantities, like in the law of ideal gas in chemistry. Thus, real-time coordinated strategies can be enhanced. To integrate all the aforementioned challenging questions, a fundamental change in the scientific approach is required through a multidisciplinary combination of physics, engineering and social sciences.
Max ERC funding: 1.24 milion Euros
Duration: 60 months
Host institution: EPFL
Project acronym: METAFERW
Domain: Social Sciences & Humanities