Monthly Archives: April 2021

New dispatching policy incorporates modular bus technology under congested traffic

New work with Monica Menendez (NYUAD) and her team (Kaidi Yang, Igor Dakic) proposes an online dispatching policy for modular autonomous bus units that is aware of the regional traffic congestion. This is achieved through an embedded 3D macroscopic fundamental diagram that is assumed to track the regional traffic. The topic is timely considering companies that are developing the modular bus technology are piloting it in Milan (Next Future Transportation) and to be commercially available in 2022, which will need effective operational policies and algorithms to fully leverage its benefits. The research is partially supported by NSF CMMI-2022967.

Link to paper here.

Study of COVID impact on NYC Transit using open-source multi-agent simulation warns of impacts on traffic

We recalibrated our synthetic population and MATSim-NYC (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X20309483) to fit COVID work-from-home conditions in 2020 and used it to evaluate varying social distancing requirements from the transit service. The study showed that full reopening may result in higher traffic levels than pre-COVID setting because of adverse impact on travelers’ preference for shared use transportation modes. The study suggests more attention to be paid toward managing transit capacity, traffic in Manhattan, and micromobility provision as it will play an important role.

Funding support from C2SMART/USDOT #69A3551747124; the paper can be found here.