Steven Shladover

Job title: 
Research Engineer
Department: 
Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology
Lead Researcher
Bio/CV: 

Dr. Shladover was one of the pioneers in the creation of the ITS program in the U.S., beginning with work on founding the California PATH Program in the mid 1980s.  He received his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he also satisfied all the course requirements for a doctorate in Transportation Systems. He began working on applications of information technology to improving surface transportation as a graduate student in 1973, and has worked since then on a wide variety of research projects.  He combines hard-core engineering expertise in dynamic systems and control with knowledge of transportation system policy, planning and economics, which enables him to effectively apply rigorous analysis methods to complicated transportation  problems. He was one of the first researchers to do in-depth investigations of probe vehicle data sampling in the days of the "vehicle­ infrastructure integration" initiative, identifying limitations in the existing probe sampling protocols and recommending  modifications.

Dr. Shladover has been managing a wide range of ITS research projects at PATH, with a particular emphasis on cooperative systems and vehicle automation.  He was the site program manager for PATH’s participation in the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium (1994-8) and subsequent to that he led PATH’s development of bus and truck platoon systems andcooperative ACC systems.   He pioneered the study of cooperative ACC in the U.S., beginning with computer simulations of thepossible effects on traffic flow, which were sufficiently encouraging to lead to the creation of an experimental program.  He led the development and evaluation of the performance of two generations of CACC systems at PATH, producing the only sustainedbody of research on this subject (and the only implementations on real vehicles) in the U.S.

Dr. Shladover’s work is widely recognized internationally, and he has held many leadership positions in professional organizations.  He chaired the TRB ITS Committee from 2004-2010 and will be chairing the TRB Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation starting in 2013.  He chaired the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD) in 1995-6 and has been leading the U.S. delegation to ISO TC204/WG14, developing international standards for vehicle-roadway warning and control systems for the past twenty years.  He is on the editorial advisory boards of the leading journals in intelligent transportation systems, Transportation Research Part C, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems and IET Intelligent Transport Systems.Dr. Shladover was honored with the ASME DSCD’s Charles Stark Draper Award for Innovative Practice in 2008 and the American Automatic Control Council’s Control Engineering Practice Award in 2011.

Research interests: 
  • Intellident Transportation Systems
  • Vehicle-Highway Automation
  • Autonomous Vehicles