Wednesday, December 1, 2021 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Uncategorized
Speaker Name
Daniel Work
Affiliation
Vanderbilt University
Building and Room number
1-131
Abstract
The majority of the best-selling cars in the US are now available with SAE level-one automated driving features such as adaptive cruise control. As the penetration rate of these vehicles grows on the roadways, it is now possible to consider controlling the bulk human-piloted traffic flow by carefully designing these driver-assist features. This talk will discuss modeling, simulation, and field demonstration advancements that are needed to control automated vehicles to stabilize traffic flow at scale. Prior work on a closed course established that automated vehicles can eliminate human-generated phantom traffic jams that seemingly occur without cause, reducing fuel consumption by up to 40%. The talk will highlight the research challenges and progress towards demonstrating traffic flow smoothing with a fleet of connected and automated vehicles on the I-24 Smart Corridor in Tennessee, as part of the CIRCLES Consortium.
Biography
Dan Work is a Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, computer science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has held research appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010-17), Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (2015, 2020), Microsoft Research Redmond (2009), and Nokia Research Center Palo Alto (2007-09). Dr. Work develops methods for monitoring and controlling road traffic using vehicles, rather than fixed infrastructure, to sense and control road congestion. In 2015 he and his collaborators were the first to experimentally demonstrate that "phantom" traffic jams, which seemingly occur without an obvious cause but are due to human driving behavior, can be eliminated via control of a small fraction of automated vehicles in the flow. Dr. Work received a 2018 Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering and a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He earned a BS from Ohio State in 2006, and an MS (2007) and PhD (2010) from UC Berkeley, all in civil and environmental engineering.