Description:

Northwestern University Transportation Center presents:

"Control of traffic composed of humans and automated vehicles"

DAN WORK
Vanderbilt University

ABSTRACT:

The majority of the best selling cars in the US are now available with SAE level-one automated driving features such as adaptive cruise control. As the penetration rate of these vehicles grows on the roadways, it is now possible to consider controlling the bulk human-piloted traffic flow by carefully designing these driver assist features. This talk will introduce modeling, simulation, and field experiments that illustrate the potential of automated vehicle systems at low market penetration rates to eliminate human-generated phantom traffic jams. It will also highlight new findings about the traffic impacts of current, commercially available level-one automated vehicle systems already on the road.

SPEAKER BIO: Dan Work is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has previously held appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, and Microsoft Research Redmond. Prof. Work is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cybernetics for Cyber-Pysical Systems and the ASCE Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Impacts Committee. His research on autonomous vehicles has appeared in numerous media outlets including Good Morning America, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. Prof. Work was named a 2018 Gilbreth Lecturer by the National Academy of Engineering, a 2018 IoT Pioneer by Connected World, a CAREER Award recipient from the National Science Foundation in 2014.