As the rapid developments of emerging technologies (e.g., smart vehicles, shared mobility, sensing, communication) in transportation engineering, unpresented research opportunities have risen at an increasingly rapid pace, ranging from element mechanism and behavior (e.g., infrastructure sensing, smart vehicle control, individual traveler behavior) to systems modeling and management (e.g., interdependence of infrastructure systems, resilient systems design, and associated equity and public health issues). Grasping these opportunities becomes increasingly crucial to the leadership of the Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) department and even the engineering college at a top university. Our research focuses on the fore-frontier multi-scale problems of smart mobility by integrating general fundamental theories and methodologies with cutting-edge interdisciplinary technology developments. Our research approaches integrate computer modeling and simulation with real-world field tests and demonstrations, which bridges upstream knowledge generation and downstream technology transfer.
Our research paradigm is illustrated in the figure on the right. It aims to establish a set of methodologies to understand, predict and eventually improve smart city systems via sensors, controllers and design variables rendered by emerging technologies (e.g., connected, automated, modular, shared and electric vehicles). It is centered at proposing fundamental models and discovering analytical properties for understanding first-order physics and behaviors of the investigated systems at different scales. Data-driven approaches will be leveraged to expand the parsimonious structures of fundamental models to capture latent system dynamics for better predictions. With good understanding and predictions, a set of optimization approaches are proposed for optimizing systems design. The discovered analytical properties will be used to construct (e.g., by revising special analytical solutions to near-optimum ones) and expedite (e.g., by reducing the solution space with theoretical bounds) the solution approaches. Last but not the least, to ensure that these theoretical and modeling developments have tangible impacts to stakeholders and the general public, we have built a set of real-world testbeds and software tools.
