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VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Highway Traffic Stability
DTSTART:20110324T121500
DTSTAMP:20260408T005524Z
UID:504ff95e3fd14114a6076e9a776dbd6c9a8eb61c34a4e042c440e2e9
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. R.E. Wilson\, University of Southampton\nMost drivers wi
 ll recognize the scenario: you are making steady progress along the motorw
 ay when suddenly you come to a sudden halt at the tail end of a lengthy qu
 eue of traffic. When you move off again you look for the cause of the jam 
  but there isn't one. No accident damaged cars  no breakdown  no dead anim
 al  and no debris strewn on the road. So what caused everyone to stop?" RA
 C news release (2005)\n\nThe (by now well-known) answer is that such "phan
 tom traffic jams" exist as waves that propagate upstream (opposite to the 
 driving direction) - so that the vast majority of individuals do not obser
 ve the instant at which the jam was created - yet what exactly goes on at 
 that instant is still a matter of debate. In this talk I'll give an overvi
 ew of empirical data and models to describe such spatiotemporal patterns. 
 The key property we need is instability: and using the framework of car-fo
 llowing (CF) models  I'll show how different sorts of linear (convective a
 nd absolute) and nonlinear instability can be used to explain the empirica
 l patterns.\n\nReferences:\n\nR.E. Wilson  Mechanisms for spatio-temporal 
 pattern formation in highway traffic models. Philosophical Transactions of
  the Royal Society: part A  366:2017-2032  2008.\n\nJ.A. Ward and R.E. Wil
 son. Criteria for convective versus absolute string instability in car-fol
 lowing models. Proceedings of the Royal Society: \npart A  2011  in press.
  Published on-line before print\ndoi:10.1098/rspa.2010.0437\n\nBiography:\
 n\nEddie Wilson is a Mathematician by background with MA and DPhil degrees
  from Oxford. In 2000 he secured his first Faculty position in the Departm
 ent of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol\n(England) - w
 here he later became Reader. During his time in Bristol he worked on the m
 athematical modelling of a variety of engineering applications but with an
  increasing focus in road transport problems.\nIn 2007 he was awarded the 
 prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and in 2010 he moved to the
  Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton  where he 
 is Professor of Modelling and Simulation.
LOCATION:GC C3 30
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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