Abstract: This talk will present new analysis and control methods for dynamical systems across scales, with applications to traffic management at the vehicle, road link, and network levels to enhance efficient use of capacity and to reduce congestion. We’ll start with a hierarchical control approach and illustrate it on vehicle and road link control examples. A key highlight will be an experimental demonstration of vehicle platooning in urban traffic. Moving on to the network level, we will explore how theories of population games and evolutionary dynamics can be applied to traffic routing. Population games model the strategy distribution among large groups of agents, while evolutionary dynamics explore how the distribution evolves as agents learn better strategies. We will discuss how these concepts can be integrated with control methods and applied to improve network-wide traffic behaviors.

Bio: Murat Arcak is a professor at U.C. Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a member of ACM and SIAM, and a fellow of IEEE and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

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