Description:

Professor Carolina Osorio

MIT

Abstract: In this talk, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of simulation-based optimization to tackle important urban mobility problems. We present analytical metamodel methods for high-dimensional continuous simulation-based optimization problems. The metamodel formulations scale linearly with network size, making them suitable for large-scale urban networks. They combine ideas from urban mobility, queueing theory and discrete choice theory.  We use these formulations to tackle high-dimensional travel demand estimation problems for the Berlin metropolitan area and for Singapore. We conclude with a discussion on recent extensions for discrete problems and for real-time continuous problems. 

Biography:  Carolina Osorio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and in the Operations Research Center (ORC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Osorio is also a Visiting Faculty at Google. Osorio's work develops operations research techniques to inform the design and operations of urban mobility systems. It focuses on simulation-based optimization algorithms for, and analytical probabilistic modeling of, congested urban mobility networks. Osorio was recognized as one of the outstanding early-career engineers in the US by the National Academy of Engineering's EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and is the recipient of a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, an MIT Technology Review EmTech Colombia TR35 Award, an IBM Faculty Award and a European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) Doctoral Dissertation Award.