Transactive Control for Urban Mobility in Smart Cities

Abstract

The concept of Smart City is gaining popular attention with the goal of sustainability and efficiency, the needs of enhancing quality and performance, and the explosion of technological advances in communication and computation. Given that 50% of the world's population lives in urban regions, critical infrastructures of energy, transportation, and health and their growing interdependencies have to be collectively analyzed and designed to provide the substrate for the realization of the Smart City Concept. This talk will address one of these infrastructures, of Urban Mobility in Transportation. With the growth and expansion of many large metropolitan centers in the last few decades, the problem of traffic congestion continues to grow and vex commuters, commercial drivers, city planners and officials, and environmentalists worldwide. Over 1 billion vehicles travel on the roads today, and that number is projected to double by 2020. Driving a car is an unavoidable choice for at least 50% of city populations, who rely on their vehicles to get to school or to work. When it comes to mobility, tremendous number of opportunities exist for the deployment of dynamic and real-time solutions using availability of data, fast and reliable communication, and ease of computation using the cloud and edge intelligence. This talk will examine one such solution, of Transactive Control, the concept of feedback through economic transactions, for Urban Mobility. Two specific examples of transactive control will be addressed, the first of which is the synthesis of dynamic toll prices with the goal of reducing traffic congestion in highways. The second example of transactive control is in the context of Mobility on Demand, where new modes of transportation other than private and public are being proposed, providing a smorgasbord of options for passengers. In both cases, the use of dynamic tariffs and feedback control principles using computational and dynamic models of the underlying socio-technical system including the transportation network and behavioral models of drivers and riders will be explored.