Following the evolvement of the digital era, the urban landscape has shifted to a new paradigm, which is named intelligent cities in recent times. The construction of an intelligent city requires to involve a complex urban environment, which integrates multiple facilities, human movements, technology, society systems, politics, and economics, and therefore the intelligent planning for the infrastructure, growth, transport, and safety. As one of the core pillars of Smart Cities, Smart Mobility encompasses new technologies and revolutionary solutions to provide a safer, greener, and more efficient future, reshaping and optimizing transportation.
Currently, some metropolitan cities already use smart transportation on a daily basis. In these urban cities, traffic congestion is a heavy and hard-to-solve problem, with many side effects including pollution, inefficiency, and accident risks. To combat various negative outcomes, progressive models have been created, signaling for demand-responsive transport, monitoring of public transport, information mobility, and many more.
In the sixth edition of the nexFrontier webinar series, we are pleased to feature the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research on Dependable, Ubiquitous Automation (NCCR Automation) and in particular its research advancements in Mobility of the Future, where concepts and components are designed for automating multimodal mobility systems, as well as individual applications in specific transport sectors.
Dr. Philppe Roesle, CEO of Swissnex in China will kick off the webinar with a short welcome, followed by Prof. Dr. John Lygeros, Director of the NCCR Automation and Head of the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, who will introduce the goals and structure of the NCCR Automation. Our first keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Nikolas Geroliminis, the Principal Investigator at the NCCR Automation and the head of the Urban Transportation Systems Lab at EPFL, will talk about large-scale monitoring and control for large-scale congested transport networks and share with us different control strategies developed based on principles of optimal control theory to improve multimodal mobility. Subsequently, Prof. Dr. Yibing Wang from Zhejiang University will present a novel traffic control concept of the internal boundary control for bi-directional lane-free traffic of connected and automated vehicles on freeways.
Our next speaker, Prof. Dr. Chi Xie from Tongji University, will introduce the Intelligent Vehicle-Platooning Transit (IVPT) system, a demand-responsive, vehicle platoon-based, exclusive lane-delimited mass transit system that integrates many conventional and emerging vehicular and traffic control technology. Following that, Prof Li Li from Tsinghua University will show us his research on cooperative driving strategies at the road network level with a macroscopic fundamental diagram.
Dr. Kenan Zhang from ETH Zurich will give an overview of her research on the ride-hail service market and show how the different matching mechanisms lead to diverse market equilibrium and, in turn, affect the design of operational strategies and regulations. To conclude, Dr. Xia Yang from Tongji University will focus on the dynamic bus allocation and routing for multimodal emergency evacuations based on the dynamic system optimum to improve evacuation efficiency.
Event Rundown
15:30-15:32 Welcome and Opening
Dr. Philippe Roesle, CEO, Consul, Swissnex in China; Head, Science, Technology, Education Office at Swiss Embassy in Beijing
15:32-15:42 Introduction NCCR Automation
Prof. Dr. John Lygeros, Director, NCCR Automation, Head, Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich
15:42-15:51 Large-scale monitoring and control for large-scale congested transport networks
Prof. Dr. Nikolas Geroliminis, Principal Investigator, NCCR Automation, Head, the Urban Transport Systems Lab at EPFL
15:51-16:00 Freeway internal boundary and ramp flow control in the lane-free paradigm of connected and automated vehicles
Prof. Dr. Yibing Wang, Vice Director, Institute of Intelligent Transportation Systems at Zhejiang University
16:00-16:09 Intelligent Vehicle-Platooning Transit System: Principles, Technologies, and System Operations
Prof. Dr. Chi Xie, Professor, College of Transportation Engineering and Urban Mobility Institute at Tongji University
16:09-16:18 Analysis of Cooperative Driving Strategies at Road Network Level with Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram
Prof. Li Li, Associate Professor, Department of Automation at Tsinghua University
16:18-16:27 Understanding the emerging ride-hail service: from matching to management
Dr. Kenan Zhang, Post-doc researcher, Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Incoming Assistant Professor at EPFL
16:27-16:36 Dynamic bus allocation and routing for multimodal emergency evacuations
Dr. Xia Yang, Research Professor, College of Transportation Engineering at Tongji University
16:36-16:45 Q&A and Discussion
Speakers
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Bio
Prof. Dr. Nikolas Geroliminis
Principal Investigator, NCCR Automation; Head, Urban Transport Systems Lab, EPFLProf. Nikolas Geroliminis is a Full Professor at EPF Lausanne and the head of the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS). Before joining EPF Lausanne he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a MSc and Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests focus primarily on urban transportation systems, traffic flow theory and control, public transportation and on-demand transport, car sharing, Optimization and Large-Scale Networks. He is a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant METAFERW: Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks. Among his recent initiatives is the creation of an open-science large-scale dataset of naturalistic urban trajectories of half a million vehicles that have been collected by one-of-a-kind experiment by a swarm of drones (https://open-traffic.epfl.ch). Among other editorial responsibilities, he is currently the Editor-In-Chief of Transportation Research part C: Emerging Technologies.
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Bio
Prof. Dr. Yibing Wang
Vice Director, Institute of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Zhejiang UniversityProf. Yibing Wang is a Full Professor at Zhejiang University, China. His research interests include road traffic flow modeling, traffic surveillance, urban and freeway traffic control, connected & automated vehicles. He has published more than 80 papers in renowned SCI journals in the fields of transportation and control research. He serves as a Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and as an Associate Editor for Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. His research has been supported by the European Commission, the Discovery program of the Australian Research Council, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the National Key R&D Program of China.
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Bio
Prof. Dr. Chi Xie
Professor, College of Transportation Engineering and Urban Mobility Institute, Tongji UniversityProf. Chi Xie obtained his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Cornell University in 2008 and is currently a Professor in the School of Transportation Engineering and Urban Mobility Institute at Tongji University. His research covers infrastructure network analysis and management, electrified and shared transportation systems, and intelligent transportation and logistics systems, in which his research interest is focused on developing innovative methods to analyze and optimize large-scale urban and regional systems on the strategic, tactic and operational levels. His research activities have been sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology of China, Ministry of Education of China, China Recruitment Program of Global Experts and other domestic and international funding sources; his research results have been published in over 130 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.
Prof. Chi Xie is a recipient of the Young Talent Award from the China Recruitment Program of Global Experts in 2013-2016, an Outstanding Young Scholar of Frontiers of Engineering from the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2017, a recipient of the Outstanding Mentorship Award from National Alliance of Electric Vehicles of China in 2020, and a recipient of the International Transport Science and Technology Leadership Award from the China Highway and Transportation Society in 2022. Currently, Prof. Xie serves as an appointed Associate Editor of International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology and Frontiers in Future Transportation, an Editorial Board Member of three other international journals, the Chair of the Transportation and Logistics System Planning Cluster (GH03) of World Transport Convention, and three committee members of Transportation Research Board.
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Bio
Prof. Li Li
Associate Professor, Department of Automation, Tsinghua UniversityProf. Li Li is an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University. He has been engaged in scientific research in the fields of intelligent transportation and intelligent vehicles. He has published more than 120 SCI search papers as the first or corresponding author. He was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, a member of the Editorial Board of Transport Reviews and ACTA Automatica Sinica. He serves as Associate Editors for the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of CAA.
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Bio
Dr. Kenan Zhang
Post-doc researcher, Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich; Incoming Assistant Professor, EPFLKenan Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, working with Prof. John Lygeros and Prof. Andrea Krause. She will join EPF Lausanne as an Assistant Professor in Transportation in September 2023. Kenan received her PhD in Transportation Engineering and MS in Statistics at Northwestern University. Her primary research interest falls in the modeling and optimization of urban transportation systems with emerging mobility services and technologies. She is also broadly interested in the applications of game theory and machine learning in transportation.
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Bio
Dr. Xia Yang
Research Professor, College of Transportation Engineering, Tongji UniversityDr. Xia Sarah Yang is a research professor at Tongji University. She received her PhD in Transportation Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and then worked as a postdoc research associate for one year. Prior to joining Tongji University, she was a tenure-track assistant professor at SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
Dr. Yang’s research interests are transportation network modeling, transportation data analysis, and urban freight modeling. She was a recipient of Franz Edelman Finalist Award and ExCEEd Teaching Workshop Fellowship awarded by INFORMS and ASCE, respectively. She worked on several key research projects funded by NSF, USDOT, and World Bank, and her research has produced more than 30 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings.
Dr. Yang served as a session chair at INFORMS annual meeting, co-chair for organizing the 8th International Symposium on Dynamic Traffic Assignment, and guest editor for Transportation Research Part C. Now she serves on several committees (ADB45，ADB30，AEP40) of Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies and the editorial board of Frontiers in Future Transportation.
In collaboration with NCCR Automation
The National Centre of Competence in Research on Dependable, Ubiquitous Automation (NCCR Automation) investigates new interdisciplinary approaches to the control of complex automated systems in order to ensure that they function reliably and safely. In five research modules, it develops methods and algorithms for implementation in concrete applications, such as the automation of energy networks (“Energy Systems” module), future mobility systems (“Mobility of the Future” module) and various industrial processes (“Industry 4.0” module). In return, these concrete applications will feed basic research (“Theoretical foundations” and “Computational methods” modules). Through networked research, the development of new technologies and education, NCCR Automation aims to strengthen Switzerland’s leading role in automation and control technology.
nexFrontier
nexFrontier is a webinar series at Swissnex in China, which spotlights cutting-edge research in Switzerland and China. With a particular focus on the Swiss National Centers of Competence in Research (NCCRs) and top-class research labs in China, this series hopes to introduce the most pioneering research advancements in Switzerland and China to an enthusiastic audience, as well as promote potential exchanges and collaborations between the two labs or institutions.