ITS Affiliate and Professor and Chair Mechanical Engineering Roberto Horowitz was the keynote speaker at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Dynamic Systems and Control Conference. He presented the Oldenberger Lecture Oct. 2, 2018 during the four-day conference in Atlanta, Ga. from Sept 30 - Oct 3, 2018.
His talk, Modeling, Control and Estimation of Traffic Road Networks, discusses some of the recent advancements in management and estimation of traffic road networks. Traffic congestion is a major source of world-wide inefficiency, with one study estimating that, in 2014, delays due to congestion cost 7 billion hours and $160B in the US alone. However, mitigating congestion through management techniques is difficult, as traffic congestion exists in a confluence of complex phenomena, such as nonlinear shockwaves, emergent macroscopic network effects from multiple agents, and low system observability and controllability. Growth of traffic demand shows no sign of decreasing, so continued infrastructure expansion must be combined with continued development of traffic control engineering to abate these societal costs. Some of today's traffic control efforts make use of novel formulations of these nonlinear systems and new sources of data provided by the connected and autonomous vehicles now entering the fleet.
Horowitz is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley and holds the James Fife Endowed Chair in the College of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree with highest honors in 1978 and a Ph.D. degree in 1983 in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and became a faculty member of the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1982. Dr. Horowitz teaches and conducts research in the areas of adaptive, learning, nonlinear and optimal control, with applications to Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS), computer disk file systems, robotics, mechatronics and Intelligent Vehicle and Highway Systems (IVHS). He is currently the Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Department is a former co-director of the Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH) research center at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Horowitz is a member of IEEE and ASME and the recipient of the 2010 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD) Henry M. Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award.