ACC 2024 Workshop: Challenges in Control for the Future of Mobility

Increasing urbanization and exacerbation of sustainability goals threaten the operational efficiency of current transportation systems and confront cities with complex choices with huge impacts on future generations. At the same time, the rise of private, profit-maximizing Mobility Service Providers leveraging public resources, such as ride-hailing companies, entangles current regulation schemes. This calls for tools to study such complex socio-technical problems. In past years, optimization and control played an important role when solving decision-making problems in this space. In this workshop, we discuss methods and tools to study the problem of designing and controlling future mobility systems and the interactions between stakeholders of the mobility ecosystem. We examine modeling regulatory aspects such as taxes and public transport prices, as well as operational matters for Mobility Service Providers such as pricing strategy, fleet sizing, and vehicle design.

Accessible from any background and seniority level, the workshop will provide basic tools to reason about these complex problems. Keynote talks from renowned experts from both academia and industry will demonstrate how such tools can be implemented to solve real-world problems and provide insights for future research avenues. The diverse background of the speakers provides multiple perspectives on the underlying challenges and exciting open problems, recognized as compelling by both academics and practitioners, effectively moving towards bridging the gap between these two worlds.

08:50-09:00 Gioele Zardini & Carlo Cenedese Welcome and introduction to the workshop

09:00-09:30 Prof. Negar Mehr Socially-Aware Control of Mixed-Autonomy Traffic Networks

in the Face of Evolving Human Behavior

09:30-10:00 Prof. Christos Cassandras Automated Mobility and Safe Interactions in Mixed Vehicle Traffic Environments

Coffee break

10:30-11:00 Prof. Fei Miao Learning and Control for Safety, Efficiency, and Resiliency of Embodied AI

11:00-11:30 Prof. Maria Laura Delle Monache Control strategies for mixed autonomy setting: theory, simulations and field experiments

Lunch break

14:00-14:30 Dr. Eric Wolff AI for Robotaxi Behaviors

14:30-15:00 Alex Wallar That’s not what we expected: A true story about putting mobility research into practice

15:00-15:30 Dr. Lukas AmbÅNuhl Use cases of digital twins for transportation systems

Coffee break

16:00-17:30 All speakers Panel discussion

Negar Mehr 

Negar Mehr will join the UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Department as an assistant professor starting from January 2024. She is currently an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UIUC. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics department from 2019 to 2020. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2019 and her B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2013. Her research interests lie at the intersection of control theory, game theory, and machine learning. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. She was awarded the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems best Ph.D. dissertation award in 2020.

Christos Cassandras and Anni Li 

Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received a B.S. degree from Yale University, M.S.E.E from Stanford University, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 500 refereed papers in these areas, and seven books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents. Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is currently an Editor of Automatica. He was the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). He has also served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS, as well as on several IEEE committees, and has chaired several conferences. He has been a plenary/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001, the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002 and 2016, and the 20th IFAC World Congress in 2017 and has also been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize and a 2014 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition (for a “Smart Parking” system and for the analytical engine of the Street Bump system respectively), the 2014 Engineering Distinguished Scholar Award at Boston University, several outstanding paper awards, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC and holds a Chair Professorship at the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University.

Anni Li received the B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and a minor in Physics from Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China, and the M.Sc. degree in operational research and cybernetics from Tongji University, Shanghai, China, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering at Boston University, Brookline, MA, USA. Her research focuses on autonomous vehicles in transportation systems, with emphasis on safe and optimal cooperation and methods for cooperative compliance for social optimality.

Fei Miao 

Fei Miao is Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a Courtesy Faculty of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Connecticut, where she joined in 2017. She is affiliated to the Institute of Advanced Systems Engineering and Eversource Energy Center. She was a postdoc researcher at the GRASP Lab and the PRECISE Lab of Upenn from 2016 to 2017. She received Ph.D. degree and the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award in Electrical and Systems Engineering, with a dual M.S. degree in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. She received the B.S. degree in Automation from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010. Her research focuses on multi-agent reinforcement learning, robust optimization, uncertainty quantification, and game theory, to address safety, efficiency, robustness, and security challenges of Embodied AI and CPS, for systems such as connected autonomous vehicles, sustainable and intelligent transportation systems, and smart cities. Dr. Miao is a receipt of the NSF CAREER award and a couple of other awards from NSF. She received the Best Paper Award and Best Paper Award Finalist at the 12th and 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) in 2021 and 2015, Best paper Award at the 2023 AAAI DACC workshop, respectively.

Maria Laura Delle Monache 

Maria Laura Delle Monache is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was a research scientist at Inria in Grenoble, France (2016-2021) and a Postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University- Camden in the USA (2014-2016). She received her Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2014. She is a member of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on smart cities and of the Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics of the Transportation Research Board (NASEM). Dr. Delle Monache’s research lies at the intersection of transportation engineering, mathematics, and control theory. 

Eric Wolff 

Eric is a Staff Research Scientist at Cruise, where he applies AI techniques to model robotaxi behaviors. He previously led the Autonomy Research team at Motional, where he helped develop new learning-based motion prediction and planning algorithms for self-driving taxis. Eric has a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University.

Alex Wallar 

Alex Wallar co-founded The Routing Company with Menno van der Zee in 2019 after leaving the PhD program at MIT CSAIL. The Routing Company has moved over 600k passengers to date with unprecedented seat utilization and route efficiency. He is an expert in optimization for mobility-on-demand systems. Alex received an S.M. in EECS from MIT in 2017 and a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of St Andrews in 2015.

Lukas Ambühl 

Lukas Ambühl received a B.Sc. degree in civil engineering and an M.Sc. degree in management, technology, and economics from ETH ZÅNurich, in 2012 and 2015, respectively, and a doctoral degree from the Research Group of Traffic Engineering, Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH. In 2021 he co-founded the ETH Zurich Spinoff, Transcality, which focuses on digital twins for transportation systems.

Karl H. Johansson

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 cyber-physical systems with applications in transportation, energy, and automation networks. 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. He is Fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.