Traffic Jams: Dynamics and Control

The introduction of the assembly line in the automotive industry about a century ago allowed the mass production of automobiles, which, in turn, revolutionized land transportation. At the same time a problem was also generated that has not yet been resolved: traffic congestion. In this talk I review the most common traffic modeling approaches and present the state-of-the-art methods that may be applied to classify the dynamical behavior of these models. I will demonstrate that using techniques from dynamical systems theory may allow one to characterize the dynamical phenomena behind traffic jam formation. Stable and unstable motions will be identified that may give the skeleton of traffic dynamics and the effects of driver behavior will be explained in determining what state is approached by a vehicular system. These results may also allow one to design cooperative autonomous cruise control (ACC) algorithms that are 'optimized at the system level' and are able to maximize traffic throughput without compromising safety.
Gabor Orosz received the MSc degree in Engineering Physics from the Budapest University of Technology (Hungary) in 2002, and the PhD degree in Engineering Mathematics from the University of Bristol (UK) in 2006. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Exeter (UK) and the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Michigan in 2010 as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the dynamics and control of complex networks with an eye to the role of information delays. His current projects include transportation systems, neural networks and gene regulatory circuits.