EPFL Assistant Professor Nikolas Geroliminis Lecture at NTUA, December 2014

Nikolas Geroliminis, NTUA Alumni and Assistant Professor at the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) gave a Lecture on December 19th, 2014, at the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of NTUA titled: “Modeling and Control of Congestion in large-scale networks with multiple modes of transport”, based on the respective ERC project he is coordinator.

Instead of the micro-modeling approach of traffic congestion, the network macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) aims to simplify the micro-modeling task of the urban network where the collective traffic flow dynamics of sub-networks capture the main characteristics of traffic congestion, such as the evolution of space-mean flows and propagation of densities in different regions of the city. The MFD can be utilized to introduce elegant control strategies to improve mobility and decrease delays in large urban networks that local ones are unable to succeed. This seminar will describe methodologies to model and understand the collective behavior for different types of urban systems, with emphasis in conflicts for the same road space. It will highlight under what physical properties the aggregated laws will provide reasonable description of congestion for single- and multi-modal systems. Ultimately, the goal is to develop optimization tools and investigate what type of real-time active traffic management schemes (congestion pricing, vehicle restriction, large scale traffic signal control) can improve mobility measures in a city for cities of different structures. We build a hierarchical feedback control network of multiple levels. The validation of the modeling methodologies and the traffic management schemes are conducted in various and complex city structures scenarios using data from field experiments and micro-simulations.

His presentation is highlighted below: