Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Andreas A. Malikopoulos (Delaware) - Decentralized Optimal Control for Energy-Efficient Mobility Systems

Description

We are currently witnessing an increasing integration of energy and transportation, which, coupled with human interactions, is giving rise to a new level of complexity in the next generation of transportation systems. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) provide the most intriguing and promising opportunity for enabling users to better monitor transportation network conditions and make better operating decisions to reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, travel delays and improve safety. While several studies have shown the benefits of CAVs to alleviate traffic congestion and reduce fuel consumption in specific transportation scenarios, one key question that remains unanswered is “how much can we improve fuel consumption, if we assume that the vehicles are connected and can exchange information with each other and with infrastructure?” In this talk, I will present a decentralized optimal control framework whose closed-form solution exists under certain conditions, and which, based on Hamiltonian analysis, yields for each vehicle the optimal acceleration/deceleration at any time in the sense of minimizing fuel consumption. The solution allows the vehicles to cross the intersections and merging roadways without the use of traffic lights, without creating congestion, and under the hard safety constraint of collision avoidance.

Bio:
Dr. Andreas Malikopoulos is the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware (UD). Before joining UD, he was the Deputy Director and the Lead of the Sustainable Mobility Theme of the Urban Dynamics Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a Senior Researcher with General Motors Global Research & Development. He received a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2000, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004 and 2008, respectively all in mechanical engineering. His research interests span several fields, including analysis, optimization, and control of cyber-physical systems; decentralized stochastic systems; stochastic scheduling and resource allocation; and complex systems. Dr. Malikopoulos is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the 2007 Dare to Dream Opportunity Grant from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the 2007 University of Michigan Teaching Fellow, and the 2010 Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship. He has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate at the 2010 German-American Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium and organize a session in transportation at the 2016 European-American FOE Symposium. He has also been selected as a 2012 Kavli Frontiers of Science Scholar by the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Malikopoulos is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ASME.