Thank you to Murat Arcak, Professor of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in UC Berkeley’s EECS department who presented Control Across Scales in Traffic Management at the Institute of Transportation Studies Transportation Seminar on Friday, October 3, 2025.
Abstract: This talk will present hierarchical control and game-theoretic methods for improving traffic management across multiple scales, from vehicles and road links to entire networks. Examples include vehicle and road link control strategies, highlighted by an experimental demonstration of platooning in urban traffic. At the network level, we explore how population games and evolutionary dynamics can enhance routing efficiency and reduce congestion, and we show how the placement and pricing of electric vehicle charging stations can be studied within the same framework. Finally, we point to curb space allocation as a fertile research topic to further improve efficiency, and we close by sharing how we used dash cams on Bear Transit buses to monitor curb usage along the UC Berkeley campus perimeter.
Bio: Murat Arcak is a professor and holds the Robert M. Saunders Endowed Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering. He earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in 1996, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. His research focuses on dynamical systems and control theory, with applications to autonomous and multi-agent systems. He has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a fellow of IEEE and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).