Category: News

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Xiaopeng (Shaw) Li to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF). His major research interests include advanced network system and traffic modeling with applications in connected autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, and electric vehicles. He is the first holder of Susan A. Bracken Faculty Fellowship at USF and is a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. He has served as the PI or a co-PI for a number of federal (NSF, USDOT, USDOE), local (e.g., state DOTs, UTCs, I-4 Corridor Program) and industry grants, amounting to a total budget of $7 million. He has published 58 peer-reviewed journal papers, many of which are in top journals such as Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Science, and Operations Research. He has served as a member on the Transportation Network Modeling Committee (ADB30) and the Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics (AHB45) of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and an Associate Department Editor for IIE Transactions Focused Issue on Operations Engineering and Analytics. Dr. Li received a B.S. degree (2006) in civil engineering with a computer engineering minor from Tsinghua University, China, an M.S. degree (2007) and a Ph.D. (2011) degree in civil engineering along with an M.S. degree (2010) in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, USA.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: Part 1 https://youtu.be/r_Ghm38COzc

YouTube link: Part 2 https://youtu.be/R38m8TdTZ1Q

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Samer Hamdar to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. He is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the George Washington University (GW) where he directs the GW Transportation Program. Dr. Hamdar holds a BE Degree from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon, 2003), a MS Degree from University of Maryland, College-Park (2004), and a PhD degree from Northwestern University (2009). He is the chair of the Transportation Research Board Connected and Automated Vehicle Subcommittee and is a member of the TRB Emergency Evacuation and Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics Committees. In terms of research, Dr. Hamdar has 15 years of experience working on driver behavior modelling, crowd dynamics and traffic safety. He has an international research background participating in projects in Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea and the United States. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award titled: “Collision Prediction and Vehicular Control Using an Episode-Based Modeling Framework”.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/U5561uSZmZI

On October 4, 2019 Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns will speak on redesigning cities and transportation.

Chuck Marohn is the President and founder of Strong Towns, a growing movement that questions the
fiscal responsibility of sprawl development patterns. He is a civil engineer and city planner whose
early career was spent widening roads and advancing auto-dependency in accordance with what
he’d been taught. He will be interviewed by Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban
Design, and Kari Watkins, Olmsted Professor of Civil Engineering.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Joel Leisch to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series.  He has engaged in transportation and traffic engineering with an emphasis on conceptual planning, functional design, geometric design, and traffic operational studies for urban freeway corridors and other high type urban facilities for more than 50 years.  He has been responsible for the planning and design studies of more than 2,000 miles (3,000km) of freeways, toll facilities, and arterials including more than 900 interchanges and 2,000 intersections and roundabouts in major metropolitan areas in 28 states and five foreign countries.  During the past 15 years a number of these projects have incorporated high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) facilities, managed (HOT) lanes, surveillance, and control, and integration with public transportation (BRT or rail) in environmentally and socially sensitive areas.
Mr. Leisch has conducted professional education training seminars, workshops, and programs in highway and traffic planning and design, freeway and interchange planning and design, and intersection and roundabout planning, design and operational analysis for State DOT’s and consultants throughout the USA, and in Canada, Denmark, Japan, Greece, Russia, Ghana and Israel.  He was a visiting lecturer at the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, Purdue University, Penn State University, Georgia Tech, U. of Texas, Texas A&M, University of Idaho, North Carolina State University and the University of California.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wfYu9nNMH8k

David Jared, Assistant Office Head, Office of Performance-based Management and Research (OPMR), will be retiring from GDOT with 25 years of service, effective October 1, 2019. David manages GDOT’s research and development program, one of the largest among state DOT’s in the U.S. He plans to work for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) in Washington D.C., a part of the National Academy of Sciences.

A farewell reception will be held at the OMAT Auditorium in Forest Park on September 20, from 10:30 a.m. – noon. Please contact Supriya Kamatkar of OPMR for details (404.347.0552).  

Finally, David wishes to thank all who have supported GDOT’s research program over the years. This broad support has been vital to the success and stature of the program within the AASHTO community.

To RSVP or give a farewell message click here.

On August 20^th 2019, David Jared, Assistant Office Head Research Section Chief of the Office of Performance-based Management and Research, held a webinar “Developing Effective GDOT Research Need Statements”.

David discussed the significance and composition of the Research Need Statement. He reviewed the submission and approval processes and timelines. There were also tips and suggestions to optimize RNS submittals.

If you missed the webinar, we’ve posted (links included) the slides and recording on the GTI site.

You can also access other information for the 2019 RNS at the RNS Portal.

The 2022 Georgia Department of Transportation call for Research Needs Statements RNS submission portal will open August 22^nd, 2022, and will remain open through September 23^rd, 2022 at 5:00 PM EST*.

Developing an effective Research Need Statement (RNS) is critical to successfully undertaking research with GDOT. An RNS is the basic means of initiating a GDOT research project and is required for all research supported through the core GDOT research program. An RNS also represents the basic means of communicating a research need to GDOT technical staff, decision-makers, and sponsoring offices and should be written with all of these groups in mind. An RNS must contain clear statements of need, approach, benefits, and implementation potential. Potential submitters are highly encouraged to review RNS guidelines and relevant other documents on the GTI website prior to submission.

The RNS submission portal may be found at http://gti.gatech.edu/content/rns-webform. (Closes September 23^rd)

Additional information on preparing an RNS may be found at http://gti.gatech.edu/content/rns-guidelines.

Any updates or additional information on the 2022 RNS request will be posted at http://gti.gatech.edu/ as they become available.

Additional information on working with GDOT may be found at http://www.gti.gatech.edu/content/working-gdot.

National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has issued an invitation for letters of interest from those wishing to be considered as a consultant for one or more of the 19 new NCHRP synthesis topics. Letters of Interest must be submitted through the Letters of Interest Web Portal by August 27, 2019. For the list of new synthesis topics and for information for potential consultants, please visit FY 2019 Synthesis Topics.

Please forward this announcement to others who may be interested. For further information, contact Jo Allen Gause at jagause@nas.edu

Effective August 9, the Research Section of GDOT’s Office of Performance-based Management and Research (OPMR) will move to One Georgia Center in downtown Atlanta.

• This move includes the following personnel: David Jared, Supriya Kamatkar, Binh Bui, and Brennan Roney.
• Administrative Assistant Amy Ramsey will remain at the Forest Park location temporarily to work on file consolidation and other transition business.
• The new physical and mailing address is OPMR/Research Section, One Georgia Center, 5th Floor, 600 W. Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308.
• The email addresses will remain the same.
• The phone numbers will change and will be shared in subsequent communications. You may continue to use current lines in the interim, including business cell lines, or contact Ms. Ramsey at 404.608.4796 as needed.

Georgia Transportation Institute welcomed Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor Dr. Srinivas Peeta to speak as part of the Transportation Speaker Series. Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies being proposed for platoon formation in the connected autonomous vehicle context assume idealized fixed information flow topologies (IFTs) for the platoon, implying guaranteed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. In reality, V2V communications are unreliable because of communication-related constraints such as interference and information congestion. Since CACC strategies entail continuous information broadcasting, communication failures can occur in congested traffic networks, leading to a platoon’s IFT varying dynamically. To explicitly factor IFT dynamics and leverage it to enhance the performance of CACC strategies, this study proposes to dynamically optimize the IFT for CACC, labeled the CACC-OIFT strategy. Under it, platoon vehicles cooperatively determine in real-time which vehicles will dynamically deactivate or activate the “send” functionality of their V2V devices to generate IFTs that optimize platoon performance in terms of string stability. CACC-OIFT consists of an IFT optimization model and an adaptive Proportional-Derivative controller. Results from numerical experiments indicate that CACC-OIFT can significantly enhance string stability of platoon control in an unreliable V2V communication context, outperforming CACCs with fixed IFTs or with passive adaptive schemes for IFT dynamics.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube links are provided below.

Part One of Three: https://youtu.be/AvKbULESofM

Part Two of Three: https://youtu.be/TUHMtgK3oKg

Part Three of Three: https://youtu.be/I8KhnzTCotU