University Events

Description: Topic: Dynamic Transportation Network Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation

Location: Lester W. Cory Conference Room, Science & Engineering Building (SENG), Room 213A

ABSTRACT:
Transportation networks are critical to the social and economic function of nations. Given the continuing increase in the populations of cities throughout the world, the criticality of transportation infrastructure is expected to increase. Thus, it is ever more important to mitigate congestion as well as to assess the impact disruptions would have on individuals who depend on transportation for their work and livelihood. Most of the previous transportation network vulnerability research has been performed in the context of static traffic models, many of which are formulated as traditional optimization problems. However, transportation networks are dynamic because their usage varies over time. Thus, more appropriate methods to characterize the vulnerability of transportation networks should consider their dynamic properties.

The two important prerequisites to build and test dynamic transportation network vulnerability assessment algorithms are (i) map extraction tools and (ii) an accurate network demand profile to test algorithms on these maps. This proposal describes the tools built to enable dynamic transportation network vulnerability assessment algorithms, including a discussion of the architecture of the software applications developed to extract maps and collect dynamic network demand data using a smartphone app.

The proposal also presents a preliminary quantitative approach to assess the vulnerability of a transportation network to disruptions with methods from traffic simulation. Our approach can identify how link criticality varies over time and is generalizable to the case where both link and node disruptions are of concern. We illustrate the approach through a series of examples. Our results demonstrate that the approach provides quantitative insight into the time varying criticality of links. Such an approach could be used as the objective function of less traditional optimization methods that use simulation and other techniques to evaluate the relative utility of a particular network defense to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience. The open source nature of the tool allows us to systematically consider many disruption scenarios and quantitatively compare their relative criticality. This is far more efficient than traditional approaches which would require days or weeks of a transportation engineers time to manually set up, run, and assess these simulations.

NOTE: All ECE Graduate Students are ENCOURAGED to attend.
All interested parties are invited to attend. Open to the public.

Advisor: Dr. Lance Fiondella

Committee Members: Dr. Paul J. Fortier and Dr. Honggang Wang, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, UMass Dartmouth; Dr. Marguerite Zarrillo, Physics Department, UMass Dartmouth; Dr. Samrat Chatterjee, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

*For further information, please contact Dr. Lance Fiondella at 508.999.8596, or by via email at lfiondella@umassd.edu.