Dr. Alexandre Bayen to speak about smart phones, Nash-Stackelberg games, and traffic management

The National Center for Transportation Systems Productivity and Management (NCTSPM) is proud to present a talk by noted transportation expert, Dr. Alexandre Bayen, on Tuesday, February 19 at 11:00 a.m. in room 109 of the Instructional Center.

View video here

The talk is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and the public.

Bayen is the principle investigator behind Mobile Millenium, a research project sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley  that launched a pilot traffic-monitoring system using the GPS in cellular phones to gather traffic information, process it, and distribute it back to the phones in real time.

In his talk, Bayen will explore the problem of real-time estimation and control of distributed parameters systems in the context of monitoring traffic with smartphones. He will present theoretical results, algorithms and implementations designed to integrate mobile measurements obtained from smartphones into distributed parameter models of traffic.

Bayen will also employ a game theoretic framework to explore Stackelberg routing games on parallel networks with horizontal queues, applicable to transportation networks. Assuming that a central authority can incentivize the routes of a subset of the players on a network, and that the remaining players choose their routes selfishly, can one compute an optimal route assignment that minimizes the total cost?

The results will be illustrated using Mobile Millennium, which is operational in Northern California and streams more than 60 million data points a day into traffic models. The talk will also present a new program recently launched in California, called the Connected Corridor program, which will prototype and pilot California’s next generation traffic management infrastructure.