Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Transportation network management remains a challenging problem despite recent advances in the engineering of cyber-physical systems. A common feature of these systems is the propagation of nonlinear dynamics over interconnected network elements. As a result, these systems exhibit complex global behavior such as large-scale congestion in traffic flow networks. The ongoing advancements in automated vehicles and infrastructure operations will further influence traffic flow dynamics and alter the global network behavior. Motivated by these challenges, this talk will focus on a class of analysis and control synthesis techniques for transportation networks. 

First, intrinsic properties of traffic flow dynamics will be exploited to derive a new structural property for transportation networks. This "mixed monotonicity" property is viewed as an extension of the classical notion of monotonicity in dynamical systems. Second, it will be shown that mixed monotonicity enables efficient finite state abstraction of traffic flow dynamics, which allows for correct-by-construction synthesis of control strategies. Third, an approach to analyze the dynamical behavior of large-scale transportation networks will be presented. This approach relies on the embedding of mixed monotone dynamics into a larger-dimensional system. Finally, future directions for the engineering of cyber-physical systems in transportation networks will be discussed.