Future Transportation in a Connected World

Today was a great day for transportation!

In my morning class in Logistics & Transportation, we had a surprise guest from India - a consultant in Transportation & Logistics who was in the US for the first time, and had spoken recently in Los Angeles at the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists. Many of my undergraduate students are interested in the consulting profession and, after an introduction, they asked her numerous questions not only about consulting but also about transportation in India and the challenges. Her talk in LA was on non-motorized last mile deliveries and associated challenges, including congestion. She told us about plans for new subway systems in India as well as the inroads that the Japanese are making in the transport sector from trains to logistics. She also talked about being the only female in her group initially and about the competition among top consulting firms for business. She noted the importance of competing on price and credentials, which I would call "quality." and experience.

Then it was time to go to lunch with a group of the Transportation faculty from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst since the group was hosting a faculty member from RPI, Professor Jeff Ban, whose advisor was Dr. Bin Ran at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and whose advisor, in turn, was Professor David E. Boyce. Academics tend to track their academic family trees or genealogy. Ran and Boyce co-authored the book, Modeling Dynamic Transportation Networks.

Information on Professor Ban's talk that took place this afternoon is below:

 Future Transportation in A Connected World

Xuegang (Jeff) Ban

Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Abstract: Emerging technologies (such as mobile sensing, connected vehicles, and new social media) make transportation components more connected. This includes connections/ communications among vehicles, and between vehicles and the infrastructure, as well as more close connections among transportation users. Such connections are transforming and will continue to further transform the transportation system. This talk will focus on certain aspects of these transformations, including (i) how mobile sensing data can be collected and used for urban traffic modeling applications; and (ii) what system analysis models may be developed to account for the connections among users.

I enjoyed his talk a lot and he emphasized issues of privacy and big data in transportation. Also, how not to just gather data but to glean knowledge from the data through algorithms, while preserving travellers' privacy.

I very much enjoyed the discussion on urban freight and the benefits of night-time deliveries in urban settings, including NYC, with some of the benefits including improved travel times and the lowering of emissions. However, a major challenge remains that the consumers, including retailers, want the deliveries to take place in the daytime and they hold the power - so discussions centered also on incentives.

Since several of my doctoral students also came to the talk I was very pleased that he mentioned the need for different behavioral models, which, coincidentally, we have been researching. And, of course, I was thrilled when he noted game theory and variational inequalities!

I took the photos below at Professor Ban's presentation and afterwards.

Happy 90th Birthday to Professor Martin Beckmann, Economist, Transportation and Regional Scientist, and Operations Researcher

On July 5th, Professor Martin J. Beckmann, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Economics at Brown University, my alma mater, will be turning 90!

I bought him the birthday card featured on the right in Gothenburg, Sweden yesterday and today wrote him a long letter and posted it to him. I was rather thrilled to find such a perfect card.

I last saw Professor Beckmann in January 2010 at a special symposium organized in his honor by Professor Hani S. Mahmassani at Northwestern University at which the photo below was taken.

Beckmann's presentation at the symposium inspired one of my recent papers, Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities,in press in Environment & Planning B, and the follow on paper, Supply Chain Network Sustainability under Competition and Frequencies of Activities from Production to Distribution, co-authored with my former doctoral student, Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, and my Gothenburg colleague, Professor Jonas Floden, which was published in the journal, Computational Management Science.

Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, along with the chair of my committee, Professor Stella Dafermos, and Professor George Majda. Sadly, Stella died at age 49 and George at age 51, but Martin soldiers on.

I will never forget sharing a delicious Ukrainian torte with him after my dissertation defense and his comments on the Braess paradox during my defense.

I have met Martin on various continents and always treasure our meetings and his brilliance.

When in Australia, just after my first book - Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was published in 1993 and I handcarried a copy to a conference in Mallacootta (in the outback), I gave a presentation at around 9 o'clock (PM), since we had had a tour. I actually thought that Martin was asleep but then he corrected a missing minus sign on my transparency and he was right - I was speaking on the latest work that I had done with Paul Dupuis on projected dynamical systems. Martin had been traveling the world that year giving talks in many different countries and, as always, enjoying great food, music, culture, sights, and people.

I have created a page on the Supernetwork Center site with information on Beckmann's classic book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, published in 1956 by Yale University Press, and co-authored with C. Bartlett McGuire (1925-2006) and Christopher B. Winsten (1923-2005). On the page, there are links to presentations and to his book and also photos.

Also, we wrote the paper, D. Boyce,  H. Mahmassani, A. Nagurney (2005),  A retrospective on Beckmann, McGuire and Winsten’s Studies in the Economics of Transportation, Papers in Regional Science 84, 85-103, and a preprint is available here. 

Beckmann's research revolutionized the modeling of travel behavior on congested urban transportation networks and is utilized in transport planning around the world to this day! Its impacts on the understanding of other networks, including electric power generation and distribution networks and even complex logistical networks and supply chains, has been profound.

He is the recipient of numerous well-deserved awards, including the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, given by the TS&L Society of INFORMS and being elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI).

We are indebted to Professor Martin Beckmann for his genius, friendship, and love of life!

Happy 90th Birthday!

And, I just heard from Professor David E. Boyce that today, June 24, is his birthday, so Happy Birthday also to Professor Boyce, another amazing scholar, mentor, and friend to many!

Collective Behavior from Animals to Pedestrians and Traffic Flow -- Symposium at the AAAS meeting

The AAAS Meeting taking place now in Washington DC is simply fantastic -- the weather the past two days was mild (with even forsythia starting to bloom) but, best of all, are the fascinating talks and the level of science and discussion at this meeting. I have been on an intellectual "high" since arriving in Washington. This conference with about 1,000 speakers is taking place at the Washington Convention Center.

Yesterday, the Mathematics and Collective Behavior Symposium took place, which was organized by Dr. Warren Page. Dr. Iain Couzin began the symposium with gorgeous videos of birds swarming, fish swimming, and throughout his presentation interwove clips of animal collective behavior (including that of sheep and caribou) coupled with some of the mathematical modeling and simulations that he conducts in his laboratory at Princeton. He even included results of a study that he did on undergraduates to try to understand pedestrian movements.

Dr. Pierre Degond then discussed his really interesting work on pedestrian flows and how the flows tend to assemble into lanes of traffic. He even mentioned cost functions associated with transportation flows. Both these speakers captivated the audience and the Q&A was great, but much too short. One audience member even noted crowds in disasters, so when it came for me to present my talk on User-optimized and System-optimized Travel Behavior, I was really ready, given the energy on the panel and in the audience.

In my presentation, I discussed the role that congestion is playing not only in urban transportation networks but also on the Internet and electric power networks. We are living in a nonlinear world. I spoke about selfish versus non-selfish travel behavior and the implications for congestion and travel time.

I brought out the Braess paradox, how we got to translate the original article, which had been published in German in 1968, with Professor Dietrich Braess and Dr. Tina Wakolbinger, so that scientists from any discipline could readily read its contents. I spoke about the methodologies that we use, and have developed, to formulate and solve centralized (system-optimized) versus decentralized (user-optimized) decision-making problems in a unifying way and how the theory of projected dynamical systems can be applied to capture the dynamic adjustment processes underlying a plethora of equilibrium problems, including traffic. I also spoke about what happens to the user-optimized flow patterns as demand varies over time and noted a recent result (in a theorem) that establishes that, as demand increases, the Braess paradox works itself out, suggesting a wisdom of crowds phenomenon, even in selfish networks. in which travelers only care about their own best route of travel.

I also talked about the network efficiency / performance measure that Dr. Patrick Qiang and I constructed that has been used to assess the importance of various links in transportation networks around the world.

I then went on to discuss our research on disasters and what concepts of movements need to be addressed there, as well as, how system-optimization can help in the optimal design of humanitarian-based supply chains for critical needs products.

I brought up how how research in network models, variational inequalities, and projected dynamical systems has now been applied to predator-prey systems and food webs, with notable success in fisheries, which helped to tie the talks at the symposium together.

The questions after my presentation were wonderful, thanks to such a knowledgeable and insightful audience, and many in the audience stayed for quite a while longer, after the symposium had officially ended, since there were so many interesting issues brought up, even potential applications to healthcare. I got a chance to speak with a female computer science faculty member from Howard University and a researcher who works in defense in Canada, the country of my birth.

I also had a chance to speak with journalists from Science News, The Economist, and was interviewed by a radio show host from Milan, Italy (now, how cool is that)! Of course, I had to tell him that the paper that I wrote (and had included a reference to in my presentation) that showed how the traffic flows evolve as demand varies in the Braess network (with applications to the Internet) was written with Professor David Parkes of Harvard and professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy! I then had lunch with a journalist who focuses on the pharmaceutical industry, and we could not stop talking about global supply chains for medicines as well as food.

The symposium was taped and I believe that AAAS will make it available.

My presentation, in pdf format, can be accessed here.

And today I found a paper that discusses models of crowds, panic behavior, and disasters and that cites not only my translation with Braess and Wakolbinger, but even work of Professor Constantine Dafermos of Brown University, who was the husband of my dissertation advisor at Brown University, Professor Stella Dafermos, who passed away two decades ago. The abstract notes that the researchers' model is able to reproduce the so-called Braess paradox for pedestrians! And, yesterday, we even noted that, when it comes to evacuations, it may be best to actually have a divider in the exit door -- reducing capacity may actually improve traffic flow!