Quantifying and Visualizing City Truck Route Network Efficiency Using a Virtual Testbed

Quantifying and Visualizing City Truck Route Network Efficiency Using a Virtual Testbed Overview Cities like NYC and Seattle need to deal with significant growth of urban deliveries as a result of increasing e-commerce compounded by increased stay-at-home behavior due to COVID-19. Even with the production of vaccines and a return to “normality” in the next…

Autonomous Vehicle Good Citizenry Standard

Autonomous Vehicle Good Citizenry Standard Overview New York City is moving toward a more efficient, safer, and sustainable future that includes autonomous vehicles for transit, e-commerce, and medical transport. However, autonomy often runs on incomplete or flawed foundations: training data sets might not prepare vehicles to “see” people of color; transit shuttles may operate without…

Digital Twin Technologies Towards Understanding the Interactions between Transportation and other Civil Infrastructure Systems

Digital Twin Technologies Towards Understanding the Interactions between Transportation and other Civil Infrastructure Systems Overview Digital Twin (DT) technology represents the next evolution in a gradual shift from physical to digital models in civil engineering. Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) revolutionized the industry by reducing the time and costs associated with documenting the design. Building Information Modeling…

Exploring AI-based Video Segmentation and Saliency Computation to Optimize Imagery-acquisition From Moving Vehicles

Exploring AI-based Video Segmentation and Saliency Computation to Optimize Imagery-acquisition From Moving Vehicles Overview Mobile sensing has offered efficient, cost-effective data collection procedures that opened new research frontiers, specifically in urban sensing and transportation. In the past, due to highly costly and time-consuming data collection procedures, a limited number of urban indicators were measured and…

Collaborative Driving, Ramp Metering and Mean-field Controls

Collaborative Driving, Ramp Metering and Mean-field Controls Overview ADAS and autonomous vehicles allow new control paradigms in traffic management. As the time horizon for driverless cars technology shifted forward in the future, collaborative driving and communication open new possibilities in the next 5-10y to realize control policies aimed at increasing safety, reducing congestion, and dissipate…

Evaluating Remote Repositioning for Shared Scooters

Evaluating Remote Repositioning for Shared Scooters Overview Utilization of vehicles, commonly measured in trips per vehicle per day, is a key to economic and environmental sustainability of shared micromobility (i.e. bikeshare and scootershare) services. With large capital costs tied up in bikes or scooters, a micromobility operator needs its vehicles to be used frequently to…

Lane Changing of Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Environments: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Lane Changing of Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Environments: A Reinforcement Learning Approach Overview According to an accident report from Volvo, lane changing maneuver is the main cause of various severe highway accidents, due to human drivers’ inaccurate estimation and prediction of the surrounding traffic, illegal maneuver, and inefficient driving skill. Autonomous driving is regarded…

Deployment and Tech Transfer of a Street-level Flooding Platform: Sensing and Data Sharing for Urban Accessibility and Resilience

Deployment and Tech Transfer of a Street-level Flooding Platform: Sensing and Data Sharing for Urban Accessibility and Resilience Overview Of the myriad impacts that are predicted to accompany climate change, flooding is expected to have an outsized influence on public health, infrastructure, and mobility in urban areas. In New York City, for example, sea-level rise…

Work Zone Safety III: Calibration of Safety Notifications through Reinforcement Learning and Eye Tracking

Work Zone Safety III: Calibration of Safety Notifications through Reinforcement Learning and Eye Tracking Overview According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), work zone fatalities at road construction projects account for up to 3% of all workplace fatalities in a given year [1], and the primary causes are runovers/backovers, collisions, and caught in-between mobile equipment.…

A Multiscale Simulation Platform for Connected and Automated Transportation Systems

A Multiscale Simulation Platform for Connected and Automated Transportation Systems Overview Traffic simulation is an important tool that can assist researchers, analysts, and policymakers to test vehicle/traffic control algorithms, gain insights of micro/macro traffic dynamics, and design traffic management strategies. However, different implementations require different simulation scales and there is no multiscale simulation platform that…