May 14, 2021

This presentation is sponsored by ITS-Davis’ partnership with the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center.

Title

Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Pandemics, and Urban Mobility Data-Driven Modeling and Analysis of Transportation Systems under the Threat of Major Disruptive Events

Time

1:40pm - 3:00pm

Location

Remote instruction

Abstract

Natural and man-made disruptive events can have a major impact on our transportation system. One of the major goals of transportation agencies is to ensure that the affected transportation systems continue to operate at an acceptable level of service even in the aftermath of such events. This goal can be achieved by developing and deploying realistic and effective on and off-line emergency management plans. In this presentation, we will use real-world examples to illustrate major issues related to emergency operations and their planning and real-time management. Then, modeling needs will be discussed with the goal of focusing on a number of emerging issues such as data driven dynamic forecasting models, use of on-line traffic data, role of feedback mechanisms, effect of uncertainties and cascading failures as well as real-world challenges. Application examples will be from the Greater NY/NJ metropolitan area where recently COVID-19 and previously hurricanes Irene and Sandy increased the awareness of the need for such comprehensive emergency decision support systems.

In the context of the fast evolving COVID-19 pandemic, various AI and machine learning techniques used to process and analyze related massive amounts of data will also be discussed with a focus on the policy implications of agency decisions. This presentation will be concluded with a brief discussion of on-going and future COVID-19 related research activities including MATSIM-NYC, the agent-based mobility model development efforts being conducted by NYU’s C2SMART transportation center (https://c2smart.engineering.nyu.edu/).

Biographical Sketch

(e-mail: kaan.ozbay@nyu.edu)

K. Ozbay joined Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) as a tenured full Professor at NYU on August 2013. He is currently the Director of the C2SMART Center (Tier 1 UTC funded by USDOT). Prior to that Professor Ozbay was a tenured full Professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering where he joined as an Assistant Professor in July 1996. In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) Department at, Princeton University.

Dr. Ozbay is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. He is also the recipient of IBM faculty award in addition to a number of best paper and excellence in research awards such as the “Franz Edelman Finalist Award for Achievement in Operations Research and Management Science”. His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including data analytics for advanced technology and sensing applications in smart cities, development of simulation models of large scale complex transportation systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics. He has co-authored 4 books and published approximately 400 refereed papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Ozbay is also an Associate Editor of the ITS journal. Dr. Ozbay is the co-editor
of a book titled “Dynamic Traffic Control & Guidance” published by Springer Verlag’s “Complex Social, Economic and Engineered Networks” series in 2013. He also serves as the Associate Editor of Networks and Spatial Economic journal and Transportmetrica B: Transportation Dynamics journal. In 2020, he joined the editorial board of the “Big Data Analytics in Transportation” journal. He has been an active member of national and international scientific and
professional committees and organizations, including IEEE, ITE, ASCE, AASHTO and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the US National Academies.
Since 1994, Dr. Ozbay, has been the Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator of 100 projects funded at a level of more than $20,00,000 by National Science Foundation, NJDOT, NYMTC, NY State DOT, New Jersey Highway Authority, USDOT, FHWA, VDOT, CUNY University Transportation Research Center (UTRC), Department of Homeland Security, USDOT ITS Research Center of Excellence.

Kaan Ozbay, Professor & Director, C2SMART Center (A Tier 1 USDOT UTC), Department of Civil and Urban Engineering & Center for Urban Science & Progress (CUSP), Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, “Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Pandemics, and Urban Mobility Data-Driven Modeling and Analysis of Transportation Systems under the Threat of Major Disruptive Events”

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