General Events

  • Thursday, February 2, 2017 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech Mason Bldg. 1133

    Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Mikhail Chester, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University . Dr. Chester will be speaking on the topic of "Transportation in the Southwest: Heat and Flooding in a Climate Impacted Future".

    ABSTRACT: The Southwest represents some of the youngest and fastest growing cities in the US, with expanding public transit networks and some of the most severe forecasts for climate change. With growing populations and investments in transit, there is pressing need to plan and operate transportation systems that can maintain services during extreme events and protect passengers. To address these challenges, transportation agencies must recognize that design and operation guidelines are often associated with historical conditions, raising questions about vulnerability in a non-stationary future. A suite of projects will be presented showing the challenges and opportunities for transportation systems in a future with more frequent and intense heat and flooding. The projects will highlight how current design practices produce infrastructure vulnerabilities, climate change requires new models for planning and operating transportation systems, and transportation systems can be positioned to reduce rider’s vulnerability.

    BIO: Mikhail Chester is an Assistant Professor in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University where he runs a research laboratory focused on studying the resilience to climate change and sustainability of urban infrastructure systems. His work spans a number of infrastructure systems with an emphasis on transportation. Using stochastic models to characterize infrastructure component performance and failure, failure trees, and simulations, Chester and his students characterize the performance of infrastructure systems under extreme heat and flooding. Chester is the co-leader of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a consortium of 10 cities across North and South America working together to develop adaptation strategies for urban infrastructure from extreme events. He maintains a body of research focused on life cycle assessment of transportation systems.  

    Chester is an Associate Editor for Transportation Research Part D, ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems, ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. Prior to ASU he was a post-doctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies. He received a Ph.D. (2008) from UC Berkeley in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He received a M.S. (2003) from Carnegie Mellon University. He received a dual degree B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy in 2002 from Carnegie Mellon University.

  • Tuesday, January 10, 2017 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm
    Sixth Engine, 438 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C., 20001

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Georgia Tech and NCTSPM and its member universities are pleased to announce that they will host a reception at the Transportation Research Board's 96th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

    View map with the convention center and reception sites marked.

  • Thursday, November 3, 2016 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech Mason Bldg. 1133

    Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Laurie A. Garrow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Garrow will be speaking on the topic of "Estimation of Airline Itinerary Choice Models Using Disaggregate Ticket Data".

    Airline itinerary choice models support many multi-million dollar decisions, e.g., they are used to evaluate potential route schedules. Classic models suffer from major limitations, most notably they use average fare information but to not correct for price endogeneity.   We use a novel database of airline tickets to estimate itinerary choice models using detailed fare data and compare these to classic itinerary choice models that use aggregate fare information but correct for price endogeneity.  In order to estimate these large itinerary choice models, we developed a new freeware program, called Larch.  Benchmarking experiments against Stata and Biogeme showed that the size of the input estimation files are 50 to 100 times larger in Stata and Biogeme, respectively. Estimation times are also much faster in Larch; e.g., for a small itinerary choice problem, a multinomial logit model estimated in Larch converged in less than one second whereas the same model took almost 15 seconds in Stata and more than three minutes in Biogeme. For more complex discrete choice models, such as the ordered generalized extreme value model, estimation times were two seconds in Larch and four to five days in Biogeme.

    Dr. Laurie Garrow is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Dr. Garrow is a leading expert in the modeling of air traveler behavior, especially as it pertains to the prediction of travel demand. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University. Her dissertation was recognized with awards from INFORMS and IATBR. She has received multiple national awards for research including the prestigious ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Award, and a NSF CAREER award. She currently serves as President of AGIFORS and has served as President of the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS.  You can learn more about Dr. Garrow’s work on this project online at  https://vimeo.com/arccorp/review/179763855/84e0ac4e82

  • Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech Mason Bldg. 1133

    Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Khaled Abdelghany, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Abdelghany will be speaking on the topic of "A Real-Time Decison Support System for Robust Traffic Network Management".

    Real-time traffic network management systems are envisioned to provide network operators with decision support capabilities to alleviate recurrent and no-recurrent congestion. These capabilities involve predicting the network congestion dynamics and facilitating the development of proactive traffic management schemes that integrate traffic control and demand management strategies. However, traffic networks are subject to numerous sources of stochasticity that make it difficult to accurately predict their operational conditions and generate effective schemes to cope with these conditions. This presentation will discuss a novel decision support system for robust traffic network management which accounts for uncertainty in the network operational conditions. The objective is to develop robust traffic management schemes such that the network overall performance remains close to optimality under the different operational conditions. The modeling framework is presented, which adopts a rolling horizon framework that integrates a meta-heuristic search algorithm and a dynamic traffic assignment simulation-based methodology. The results of a set of simulation experiments that examine the system performance under different operational conditions are discussed.

     

    Dr. Khaled Abdelghany is an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Southern Methodist University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. He also worked as an operations research analyst at United Airlines' R&D Division. Dr. Abdelghany joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Department at SMU in 2004 as an Assistant Professor with the responsibility of developing a transportation research program in the department. He served as the chairman of the department from 2011 to 2016. Dr. Abdelghany has extensive research experience in transportation network modeling, real-time traffic network management systems, crowd dynamics and evacuation studies, connected vehicle applications and airlines strategic planning and operations management. Dr. Abdelghany authored one book and numerous peer-reviewed journal and conference articles. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, NGOs and several consulting firms. 

  • Thursday, October 6, 2016 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech Mason Bldg. 1133

    Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Roger Wayson, Ph.D. and P.E., Research Engineer at KBRWyle. Dr. Wayson will be speaking on the topic of "Continuing to Understand and Improve Regulatory Models for Transportation Air Quality".

    Regulatory models for both emission and dispersion modeling are continually being updated to use in transportation air quality analysis.  It is important that the underlying assumptions and implementation of methods are understood in these models to avoid misuse and/or large errors.  Additionally, it is important that the development and updating of these models continue as we better understand the needs, uses, and desires of the analyst.  This presentation explores two topic areas from three different research efforts.  The first area covered will be specific to the EPA motor vehicle emission model (MOVES) while the second part discusses dispersion modeling of aircraft at airports.  The MOVES project that will be discussed involves modeling of ethanol blends with MOVES; in regards to both inputs and how the output emissions are changed.  The dispersion modeling will review how LiDAR measurements have been used to improve estimates from the EPA dispersion model AERMOD at airports as used in FAA regulatory models and possible future enhancements.  The presentation will conclude with a discussion of using Puff modeling applications at airports.

    Dr. Roger Wayson has been working in the fields of noise and air pollution measurements, modeling, and abatement, primarily from mobile sources, for over 44 years. He has a Bachelor and Masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.  He has authored numerous papers on transportation noise/air quality and was a lead author with the 2007 IPCC Nobel Peace Prize winning team.  He retired as a full professor from the University of Central Florida to take a job with the U.S. Department of Transportation as a National Expert in the Environmental Measurement and Modeling Division at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.  He recently retired from his government position to take on another challenge and is working as a Research Engineer with KBRWyle. 

  • Thursday, September 8, 2016 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech Mason Bldg. 2117 (Please note location)

    Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Zhanmin Zhang, Clyde E. Lee Endowed Professor in Transportation Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Zhang will be speaking on the topic of "Enhancing Infrastructure Management Through Cross-asset Resource Allocation".

    Resource allocation mechanisms have become a major issue for transportation agencies in the U.S. and around the world. One of the main concerns with the transportation asset management (TAM) framework and its implementation is the absence of an organized process for cross-asset resource allocations. The objective of this study is to develop an innovative methodological framework for cross-asset resource allocations, yielding a data-oriented approach to enhancing infrastructure management. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodological framework, a case study was conducted using two asset groups, pavements and bridges, from a roadway network in Texas.   Results from the case study show that the proposed methodological framework has great potential as a tool to support highway agencies in performing cross-asset resource allocations at the network level.

    Dr. Zhanmin Zhang is Professor and holds the Clyde E. Lee Endowed Professorship in Transportation Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Director of the Center for Resilient Infrastructure and Smart Cities. Dr. Zhang has been actively conducting research in the engineering and management of infrastructure systems and the applications of advanced information systems to infrastructure management for more than 25 years in the United States and abroad.  His current research interests include: large-scale infrastructure systems simulation, robust maintenance policies, optimal resource allocations, and innovative financing mechanisms for infrastructure systems, and infrastructure resilience.  

  • Thursday, September 1, 2016 - 11:00am
    Georgia Tech, Mason Bldg, Room 1133

    Patricia Mokhtarian (Georgia Institute of Technology)Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Patricia Mokhtarian, Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Mokhtarian will be speaking on the topic of "Well-being and Travel: Retrospect and Prospect".

    Although the improvement of well-being is often an implicitly-assumed goal of many, if not most, policies, the study of subjective well-being (SWB) and travel has so far been confined to a relatively small segment of the travel behavior community.  Accordingly, one main purpose of this talk is to introduce a larger share of the community to some fundamental SWB-related concepts and their application in transportation research, with the goal of attracting others to this rewarding area of study.  At the same time, however, I also hope to offer some useful reflections to those already working in this field.  After presenting some basic issues of terminology and measurement of SWB, I present four conceptual models relating travel and subjective well-being.  Following one of those models, I review five ways in which travel can influence well-being.  I conclude by examining some challenges associated with assessing the impacts of travel on well-being, as well as challenges associated with applying what we learn to policy.

    Patricia Mokhtarian is the Susan G and Christopher D Pappas Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.  Prior to joining Tech in 2013, she spent 23 years at the University of California, Davis, where she was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, associate director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, and founding chair of the interdisciplinary MS/PhD program in Transportation Technology and Policy.  Dr. Mokhtarian has specialized in the study of travel behavior for more than 30 years, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 refereed journal articles, technical reports, and other publications.  She is the current chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research.  She is a North American area editor of the journal Transportation, and is on the editorial boards of Transportation Research Part A, Transport Policy, Transportation Letters, the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, and Travel Behavior and Society.  Her PhD is from Northwestern University.  Dr. Mokhtarian's Google Scholar profile may be seen at: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=84jTPKEAAAAJ.

  • Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm
    Sixth Engine, 438 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C., 20001

    Georgia Tech and NCTSPM and its member universities are pleased to announce that they will host a reception at the Transportation Research Board's 95th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

  • Friday, April 17, 2015 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
    Georgia Tech

    Join NCTSPM and the Georgia section of ITE for a picnic at their monthly meeting. More details will follow soon.

  • Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 6:45pm to 9:45pm

    Georgia Tech hosted a reception at the 2013 Transportation Research Board annual meeting. Researchers and students from a number of universities attended the reception.

     

     

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