Thank you to Ketan Savla, Associate Professor and John and Dorothy Shea Early Career Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California, who presented Learning for Traffic Control at the Institute of Transportation Studies Transportation Seminar on Friday, November 14, 2025.
Abstract: The increasing attention to data-driven traffic management and adjacenttechnologies has warranted revisiting transportation models from the perspective ofonline learning and control. We present our contributions in this context for canonicalsettings from demand and supply side traffic management. We show how appropriatecombination of lifting and control of conventional traffic flow models can help to maintainsystem performance under unknown model parameters and sparse trafficmeasurements. On the demand side, we show that integrating revealed preference andnested decision paradigms can increase the effectiveness of emerging pricing andtravel recommendation mechanisms. The findings are illustrated through case studiesand controlled human subject experiments.
Bio: Ketan Savla is an Associate Professor and John and Dorothy Shea Early Career Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California, with joint appointments in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (courtesy), and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems (courtesy). Prior to that, he was a research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and M.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He has served as an Associate Editor for the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Network Systems, and the IEEE Control Systems Letters. He currently serves as a senior editor for the IEEE Control Systems Letters. He is also a co-founder and the chief science officer of Xtelligent, Inc.