Spring 2007 UMASS Amherst
Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series


Date: Friday, March 30, 2007

Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112

Speaker: Professor Daiheng Ni

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
UMass Amherst

Biography: Daiheng Ni  is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received an M.Sc. in Civil Engineering,  an M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include: traffic flow theory and simulation, intelligent transportation systems, traffic sensing and information technology, and transportation logistics and optimization. He has published his research in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, the International Journal of Emergency Management, the Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, and Applied Mathematical Modelling.

TITLE: Transportation Modeling and Simulation:
an Effort of 50+ Years

Abstract: It has been half a century since the seminal work on traffic flow, the L-W-R model, was published. Transportation modeling and simulation has evolved from simple to complex and numerous models have been proposed and simulation packages developed. Macroscopic models capture high-level traffic dynamics using fluid-based techniques; mesoscopic models apply Cellular Automata to describe traffic movement with reasonable fidelity; microscopic models provide finer level of detail by personalizing each driver-vehicle unit and describing its behavior using car-following, lane-changing, and gap-acceptance logics. Today, these models and packages are serving as powerful tools in transportation engineering research and practice. This talk will review the evolution of transportation modeling and simulation. In addition, future directions will be discussed with an emphasis on models beyond the microscopic level.
 
This series is organized by the UMASS Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, INFORMS, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund.

For questions, please contact the INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker Series Coordinator, Ms. Trisha Woolley, twoolley@som.umass.edu