PECASE: Dynamic Phenomena in Transportation: A Research and Educational Perspective

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This grant provides funding for the development of a theory for understanding the nature of traffic equilibria as well as various associated phenomena that arise in a variety of systems including transportation, communication and manufacturing. Studying these problems is important in transportation planning due to the growing congestion of urban and highway transportation systems worldwide as well as the development of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems. Specifically, this research aims to establish a more accurate understanding of microscopic and macroscopic phenomena of traffic patterns, provide insight and lead to a testable theory of equilibria in transportation networks. It will draw upon a broad collection of methodologies including dynamical systems, statistical learning, neural networks, mathematical optimization, and queuing network theory. To promote the philosophy of the research program a variety of educational activities will also be pursued.The results of this research will develop an alternative theory of equilibrium in transportation problems that will be able to make empirically testable predictions of traffic patterns and delays in the transportation network. This research will address a variety of questions such as: What is the dynamic nature of traffic equilibrium? How are delays dynamically changing? What is the role of information to travelers in the formation of traffic patterns? How can we control what information to release to travelers in order to induce certain desirable behavior? The results of this research will also provide insights concerning variousimportant issues such as bottleneck phenomena that arise when capacity of a local component in a distributed transportation system decreases substantially and causes congestion in the rest of the network (for example, a traffic accident). The work will also contribute to the development of dynamic optimization and equilibrium analysis.