Predictive Resilience and Optimization Methods for Emergency Transportation Handling and Enhanced Urban Stability (PROMETHEUS)
Duration: April 2026 - March 2029
About
Transportation systems provide essential services for the people who live in urban centers. However, these systems are not immune to disruption, and large-scale disruptive events, such as natural disasters and pandemics, have the potential to substantially reduce the connectivity of communities. Moreover, the speed at which communities return to normal operation can be seen as a measure of a transportation system’s resilience. A key challenge in designing network-level control policies to allow transportation networks to quickly return to normal operating conditions is the ability to understand and model how the disrupted system will respond to different control inputs. In an ongoing collaboration, Prof. Antoniou and Prof. Stern have been studying how to use sparse nonlinear methods such as SINDy to quickly model the disrupted system and implement control. In the proposed dissertation, Profs. Antoniou and Stern plan to supervise a PhD who will expand on this existing successful work to build a framework for rapid response to transportation network disruption. This will include two primary thrusts: (i) Disruption Detection and (ii) Disruption Mitigation. Together, these thrusts will provide methods to quickly identify transportation network disruptions through anomaly detection methods, and quickly model the disrupted system response, and finally close the loop by designing control schemes for the disrupted system dynamics to help the transportation network quickly return to normal operating conditions.
Partners
The chair of Transportation Systems Engineering (TSE) of TUM is collaborating with a TUM IAS-funded researcher program over a period of three years. The project is jointly supervised by Prof. Antoniou and Prof. Stern from the University of Minnesota, USA. The research will provide valuable insights into resilient management of transportation networks under different types of disruptions. With increased severe weather events, as well as the global threat of terrorism and cyber threats, these methods will help provide stability in an uncertain and highly connected world.