TITLE:  “Analytical Model to Capture Information Flow Congestion Effects in a Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications-Based Traffic System”

ABSTRACT: Transportation is entering an era of unprecedented transformation, with connectivity and automation in the vehicle revealing new possibilities for innovation to enable societal impact. In this context, vehicular traffic congestion in a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication environment can lead to congestion effects for information flow propagation. Such congestion effects can impact whether a specific information packet of interest can reach a desired location, and if so, in a timely manner to influence the traffic system performance. Motivated by the usefulness and timeliness of information propagation, this talk aims to characterize the information flow propagation wave (IFPW) for an information packet in a congested V2V communication environment under an information relay control strategy. This strategy seeks to exclude information that is dated in the communication buffer under a first-in, first-out queue discipline, from being relayed if the information flow regime is congested. A macroscopic two-layer model is proposed to characterize the IFPW. The upper layer, inspired by some conceptual similarities with models for disease spreading in epidemiology, is formulated as integro-differential equations to characterize the information dissemination in space and time under this control strategy. The lower layer adopts the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model to capture the traffic flow dynamics. Closed-form solutions for the asymptotic IFPW speed and asymptotical density of informed vehicles are derived under homogeneous traffic conditions, and numerical solutions are illustrated for heterogeneous conditions. The study insights can be leveraged to develop a new generation of information dissemination strategies, and to determine V2X-infrastructure locations.

BIO: Dr. Srinivas Peeta is the Jack and Kay Hockema Professor in Civil Engineering at Purdue University. He is the Director of the NEXTRANS Center, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s) Region 5 Regional University Transportation Center (UTC) (2006-2018). He is also the Associate Director of the USDOT Center for Connected and Automated Transportation, the new USDOT Region 5 UTC (2016-2022). He received his B.Tech., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras), Caltech and The University of Texas at Austin, respectively. He was a past Chair (2007-2013) of the Committee on Transportation Network Modeling of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. He has authored or co-authored over 270 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings. His research interests are multidisciplinary and broadly span transportation and infrastructure systems.