Visiting speaker Joshua Auld
On the 17 October rCITI was honoured to have Joshua Auld, Ph.D. Principal Computational Transportation Engineer, Systems Modeling and Controls, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL United States of America, present at one of its seminars.
Dr. Joshua Auld is a Principal Computational Transportation Engineer in the Systems Modeling and Control Group in the Center for Transportation Research at Argonne National Laboratory. His primary research areas are in travel demand modeling, traveler behavior, travel surveying and activity-based microsimulation modeling, with a specific focus on connected and automated vehicle system impacts and emergency planning applications. He is currently leading efforts at Argonne relating to transportation systems simulation and modeling for new mobility options. He serves on both the Committee on Travel Demand Forecasting and the Special Committee for Travel Forecasting Resources on the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council. Dr. Auld has published over 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and 4 book chapters. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He spoke on POLARIS modeling suite that was been developed at Argonne National Laboratory under contract with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the U.S. Department of Energy over the past four years. The research program was focused on the development of new and improved tools for creating integrated, interoperable, and extensible model systems to address new transportation management and operations policies. The focus of the POLARIS suite is to support the evaluation of advanced technologies, policies and control strategies at regional scale, notably planning for operations and emerging vehicle and roadside technologies. The suite is designed as a set of libraries that can interoperate and be used to develop an integrated transportation model. In this workshop, we will discuss:
• The development of the POLARIS agent-based modeling architecture, with a focus on computational techniques that allow for the creation of efficient, high-performance agent-based models. Details regarding the computational framework including memory-management, discrete-event scheduling and execution will be detailed. The set of allied model building tools, including network editing, visualization and post-process will also be discussed.
• The implementation of an integrated activity-based model system that includes aspect of demand generation, activity planning, route choice and traffic simulation in a unified framework. Details of the underlying activity-based model, including hazard-based demand generation, discrete choice model for activity planning, activity scheduling logic and population synthesis will be presented. Finally, the development of a simulated dynamic traffic assignment algorithm and details of the traffic simulation model will be discussed.
• Extensions of the POLARIS model and application to research in ITS, connected and automated vehicles, emergency response and energy use. The use of POLARIS models in current projects ranging from the analysis of platooning strategies, energy impacts of CACC deployment at regional scale, to transit emergency response and recovery will be discussed.
