Dr. Srinivas Peeta (Purdue University)

On Thursday, October 29, NCTSPM will welcome Dr. Srinivas Peeta to the Transporation Speaker Series. Dr. Peeta is a Professor of Civil Engineering in the Transportation and Infrastructure Systems group of the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, as well as serving as the Director of the NEXTRANS Center. He will be speaking on the topic of "Modeling the Information Flow Propagation Wave under Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications".

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications under the connected vehicle context have the potential to provide new paradigms to enhance the safety, mobility and environmental sustainability of surface transportation. Understanding how the information propagates in space and time is a key aspect for V2V communications based applications. Most existing analytical models assume instantaneous propagation of information flow through multi-hop communications. It ignores the spatiotemporal interactions between the traffic flow dynamics and V2V communication constraints. This study proposes a macroscopic two-layer model to characterize the information flow propagation wave (IFPW). The traffic flow propagation is formulated in the lower layer  as a system of partial differential equations based on a multi-class Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model. Due to their conceptual similarities, the upper layer adapts and modifies a spatial Susceptible-Infected epidemics model to describe information dissemination between V2V-equipped vehicles using integro-differential equations. A closed-form solution is derived for the IFPW speed under homogeneous traffic conditions. The IFPW speed is numerically determined for heterogeneous traffic conditions. Numerical experiments illustrate the influence of traffic density heterogeneity on the IFPW speed. The proposed model can capture the spatiotemporal interactions between the traffic and V2V communication layers, and aid in the design of novel information propagation strategies to manage traffic conditions.

Dr. Srinivas Peeta is a Professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University and the Director of the NEXTRANS Center, the USDOT’s Region 5 University Transportation Center. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech and University of Texas at Austin, respectively. He is the immediate past Chair of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Transportation Network Modeling. He has authored over 225 refereed articles in journals and conference proceedings, and has over 440 invited and/or international conference talks. He serves on the editorial boards of Transportation Research Part B, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, and Transportation in Developing Economies, and is the Area Editor for Transportation Dynamics for Networks and Spatial Economics. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Korean Society of Civil Engineering Journal of Civil Engineering. He has received more than US $30 million in sponsored research funding. Some of his awards include the INFORMS Transportation Science Dissertation award, NSF CAREER award, the ASCE Walter Huber Prize, and paper awards (from TRB, IEEE and other conferences). Five dissertations supervised by Dr. Peeta received best dissertation awards from the Council of University Transportation Centers and the International Association for Travel Behavior Research. His research interests are multidisciplinary and broadly span transportation and infrastructure systems.