Speaker: Karl H. Johansson, Fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Host: Li Zhongkui, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering

Time: 15:00-16:30, April 8, Friday, 2022

Venue: Zoom Meeting ID: 990 4937 2885  Passcode: 974872

Abstract:

While the long-term benefits of introducing connected and automated vehicles into road traffic are widely understood to be revolutionary, there is much debate about whether its early stages will cause an increase in congestion and issues related to human-driven vehicles. Notwithstanding, connected vehicles acting as mobile sensors and actuators could enable traffic predictions and control at a scale never before possible, and thereby a much more efficient use of the available road infrastructure. In this talk, we will present how a new freight transport technology based on automated truck platoons can be the backbone for such a system. Some basic theoretical and experimental results on the control and coordination of truck platoons will be presented. How such platoons influence traffic flows by acting as a moving bottleneck will be discussed together with traffic models suitable for designing novel traffic control systems. It will also be argued that these models are possible to learn automatically from data gathered by platoons acting as traffic flow sensors. Experiments show that relatively few connected vehicles are enough to mitigate stop-and-go waves and improve traffic conditions significantly. The presentation is based on joint work with Miguel Aguiar, Matthieu Barreau, Mladen Cicic, and many others.

Biography:

Karl H. Johansson is Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Director of Digital Futures. He received MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Automatic Control from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Caltech, NTU, HKUST Institute of Advanced Studies, and NTNU. His research interests are in networked control systems and cyberphysical systems with applications in transportation, energy, and automation networks; areas in which he has co-authored more than 800 journal and conference papers and holds 6 patents. He is President of the European Control Association and member of the IFAC Council, and has served on the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences. He has received several best paper awards and other distinctions from IEEE, IFAC, and ACM. He has been awarded Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor, Wallenberg Scholar with the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Future Research Leader Award from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the triennial IFAC Young Author Prize, and IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer.

Source: College of Engineering