Christian Claudel, Robust Control of Traffic Flow on Networks using Chance Constrained Optimization
Traffic control on networks is one of the most cost-effective and scalable solutions to worsening urban traffic congestion. This talk discussed a novel formulation of robust network traffic control involving a first order traffic flow model, with initial condition, model parameter and intersection parameter uncertainty. First a fast numerical scheme (Fast Lax-Hopf) for solving the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model on networks was presented. Then, this scheme was used to formulate the boundary control problem as a Linear Program (LP), given corresponding initial conditions and the model parameters. Later, a stochastic programming counterpart involving chance constraints, to capture the uncertainty in the initial conditions, or in the junction parameters, was presented. A validation on a simulated road network was conducted, and the performance of the optimal control was validated using a Monte Carlo simulation.
Christian Claudel is an Assistant Professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT-Austin. He received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from UC-Berkeley in 2010, and the MS degree in Plasma Physics from Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 2004. He received the Leon Chua Award from UC-Berkeley in 2010 for his work on the Mobile Millennium traffic monitoring system. His research interests include control and estimation of networked and distributed parameter systems, wireless sensor networks, and robotics.