Traffic Management for the 21st Century

Abstract: 

Traffic congestion on urban road and motorway networks has strong economic and social impacts.

A significant and growing interdisciplinary effort by the automotive industry, as well as by numerous research institutions, has been devoted in the last decades to planning, development, testing and deployment of a variety of Vehicle Automation and Communication Systems (VACS) that are expected to revolutionise the features and capabilities of individual vehicles within the next decades. If exploited appropriately, the emerging VACS may enable sensible novel traffic management actions aimed at mitigating traffic congestion and its detrimental implications.

The presentation starts with a brief introduction to the rationale and impact of traffic management, along with an overview of expected changes in the years and decades to come. Existing, planned and emerging VACS, which have an impact on the traffic flow characteristics, are discussed and classified; and potential implications for future traffic management are presented. Related research needs and specific tasks and challenges are identified and commented. Some results from the European Research Council project TRAMAN21 (Traffic Management for the 21st Century) referring to (microscopic and macroscopic) traffic flow modelling, traffic state estimation, system architecture, local and network-wide control tasks and approaches, are briefly outlined.

Markos Papageorgiou

Technical University of Crete

Markos Papageorgiou received the Diplom-Ingenieur and Doktor-Ingenieur (honors) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1976 and 1981, respectively. He was a Free Associate with Dorsch Consult, Munich (1982-1988), and with Institute National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Sécurité (INRETS), Arcueil, France (1986-1988). From 1988 to 1994 he was a Professor of Automation at the Technical University of Munich. Since 1994 he has been a Professor at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. He was a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1982), at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris (1985-1987), and at MIT, Cambridge (1997, 2000); and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (1993, 1997, 2001, 2011) and other universities.

Dr. Papageorgiou is author or editor of five books and of over 450 technical papers. His research interests include automatic control and optimisation theory and applications to traffic and transportation systems, water systems and further areas. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research – Part C (2005-2012). He also served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Control Systems Society – Conference Editorial Board, of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and other journals. He is a Fellow of IEEE (1999) and a Fellow of IFAC (2013). He received a DAAD scholarship (1971-1976), the 1983 Eugen-Hartmann award from the Union of German Engineers (VDI), and a Fulbright Lecturing/Research Award (1997). He was a recipient of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award (2007) and of the IEEE Control Systems Society Transition to Practice Award (2010). He was presented the title of Visiting Professor by the University of Belgrade, Serbia (2010). The Dynamic Systems and Simulation Laboratory he has been heading since 1994, received the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society ITS Institutional Lead Award (2011). He was awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (2013-2018).

This presentation is generously sponsored by the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA).