Title

Nash-Stackelberg Games in Transportation Networks: Leveraging the Power of Smartphones for Traffic Monitoring and Management

Time

1:40 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Abstract

The first part of this talk investigates the problem of real-time estimation and control of distributed parameters systems in the context of monitoring traffic with smartphones. The recent explosion of smartphones with internet connectivity, GPS and accelerometers is rapidly increasing sensing capabilities for numerous infrastructure systems. The talk will present theoretical results, algorithms and implementations designed to integrate mobile measurements obtained from smartphones into distributed parameter models of traffic. The models considered include Hamilton-Jacobi equations, first order conservation laws and systems of conservation laws. Other techniques developed will be briefly presented as well, relying on ensemble Kalman filtering.

In the second part of the talk, a game theoretic framework is developed to study Nash-Stackelberg routing games on parallel networks with horizontal queues, applicable to transportation networks. First, a new class of latency functions to model congestion with horizontal queues is introduced. Then, for this class of latency, the Stackelberg routing game is studied: assuming that a central authority can incentivize the routes of a subset of the players on a network, and that the remaining players choose their routes selfishly, can one compute an optimal route assignment (optimal Stackelberg strategy) that minimizes the total cost? A simple strategy is proposed, the Non-Compliant First (NCF) strategy, that can be computed in polynomial time. The strategy is showed to be optimal. It is also showed to be robust, in the sense that some perturbations of the NCF strategy are still optimal strategies.

The results will be illustrated using a traffic monitoring system launched jointly by UC Berkeley and Nokia, called Mobile Millennium, which is operational in Northern California and streams more than 60 million data points a day into traffic models. The talk will also present a new program recently launched in California, called the Connected Corridor program, which will prototype and pilot California’s next generation traffic management infrastructure.

Biographical Sketch

Alexandre Bayen received the Engineering Degree in applied mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, France, in July 1998, the M.S. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in June 1999, and the Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in December 2003. He was a Visiting Researcher at NASA Ames Research Center from 2000 to 2003. Between January 2004 and December 2004, he worked as the Research Director of the Autonomous Navigation Laboratory at the Laboratoire de Recherches Balistiques et Aerodynamiques, (Ministere de la Defense, Vernon, France), where he holds the rank of Major. Bayen has been at UC Berkeley since 2005 and is currently a Chancellor Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. He authored two books, over 150 peer reviewed publications. His projects Mobile Century and Mobile Millennium received the 2008 Best of ITS Award for ‘Best Innovative Practice’, at the ITS World Congress and a TRANNY Award from the California Transportation Foundation, 2009. He is a NASA Top 10 Innovators on Water Sustainability, 2010. He has received several awards including the Ballhaus Award from Stanford University, 2004; the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, 2009; the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the White House, 2010; the Okawa Resarch Grant Award, 2013; the Ruberti Prize from the IEEE, 2013, and the Walter Huber Prize from the ASCE, 2014. His research has been featured several hundred times in the media, including TV channels and radio stations (CBS, NBC, ABC, CNET, NPR, KGO, the BBC), and in the popular press (The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post).