New directions in urban traffic control of complex transport systems

Efficient traffic control and management of large-scale transportation networks still remain a challenge both for traffic researchers and practitioners. Over decades, control strategies have been proposed and applied for isolated or coordinated intersections in arterials, while in the last decade several works have utilized the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) for developing real-time control strategies to improve mobility and decrease delays in large urban networks. This seminar will focus on enhanced modeling and advanced perimeter control of uncertain MFD systems for multiple-region networks.
 
In the first part of this seminar, an enhanced accumulation-based model is developed by incorporating into model structure the time-delay (time-lag) effects as an important factor. The model incorporates state delay in the MFD output to improve the dynamics, i.e. representing wave propagation and travel time evolution within the region. The reference model adaptive control approach has been implemented to allow us designing distributed adaptive perimeter control laws. The numerical results demonstrate the flexibility of the distributed adaptive perimeter controllers in handling different cases and various traffic situations with state delays.

The second part of this seminar will focus on actuation failures in perimeter control. Actuation failures might cause severe system performance degradation, if the control policy is not designed to compensate these failures. The component failures are uncertain in nature, and very often it is impossible to predict in advance which component may fail during system operation, and when the component failure occurs. An adaptive fault-tolerant distributed control scheme is developed for a multi-region MFD system model. The control goal is to achieve a desired tracking performance with simultaneous (i) actuating control components failures, (ii) model parameters uncertainties, and (iii) unknown demand disturbances.  

Bio : Jack Haddad is an Assistant Professor of Transportation Engineering with the Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the Head of the Technion Sustainable Mobility and Robust Transportation (T-SMART) Laboratory. He received all his degrees B.Sc. (2003), M.Sc. (2006), and Ph.D. (2010) in Transportation Engineering from the Technion. He served as a post-doctoral researcher (2010-2013) at the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS), EPFL, Switzerland. In 2008, he was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. His current research interests include autonomous vehicles, traffic flow modeling and control, large-scale complex networks, advanced transportation systems management, and public transportation.
Dr. Haddad is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee of Transportation Systems, and a member of the Executive Council of the Israeli Association for Automatic Control (IAAC). He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and the Control Engineering Practice. He also serves on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Research Part C, Transportation Letters, and many international conferences. He was a recipient of the European Union Marie Curie, Career Integration Grant (CIG), ``SMART - Sustainable Mobility and Robust Transportation”, and a recipient of the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant with lab equipment, `` Urban traffic networks feedback control: new directions”.