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MIT Mobility Forum
The MIT Mobility Forum showcases the groundbreaking transportation research occurring across the Institute. Faculty members and researchers present their latest findings, ideas, and innovations, followed by a lively discussion. The Forum is online and open to all. Please register at Zoom beforehand.
SPRING 2023
Envisioning Profitable Autonomous Transit Networks
It has been almost 20 years since the DARPA "SmartDrivingCar" Challenges and 15 years since Google jumped in with the objective of providing demand-responsive automated mobility and we're still "envisioning" as if this challenge is like that of achieving nuclear fusion... always "50 years away, but once we get there, then the return to society is absolutely non-trivial".
Presented is my perspective on automated mobility gained from a more than 50 year career largely focused on achieving safe, affordable, equitable, sustainable high-quality mobility for our towns and cities. Reviewed will be what was tried and why it failed; where we've been recently and why it has struggled; and where is it that we might be going and what are the challenges and chances of success.
Looking forward, the concept of Autonomous Transit Networks is presented and assessed using the Princeton Synthetic Daily PersonTrip (PSDPT) data set of the 1.1 billion individual person trips made by the 320 million persons on a typical day.
The mobility opportunity and operational challenges of several conceptual deployments are presented. The challenges associated with the scaled realization of such deployments will be discussed.
Alain Kornhauser
Professor of Operations Research & Financial Engineering
Director, Transportation Program, Princeton university
February 17, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM
Telemobility, Hybrid Work and the Next Normal
The world has changed considerably for transportation planners since April 2020—and it is still changing, in many ways that are fundamental to how we work, shop, play, seek health care, and travel. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered the remote work landscape in the U.S. and there is growing evidence that at least some portion of the remote work trends will stick beyond the pandemic. The next normal for work will result from complex interactions amongst multiple factors, shaped by the experience of both employees and employers whose joint decisions will determine the evolutionary pathway of the hybrid workplace.
To help understand the forces shaping these experiences, we have conducted separate longitudinal tracking surveys of both employees (7 waves) and employers (5 waves). We aim to understand employee satisfaction with telework, and reveal and characterize clusters of telework trajectories through and beyond the pandemic. We study the effect of telework on the activity participation behavior of teleworkers, especially with regard to the frequency, location and timing of out-of-home non-work activities. We also study the employer-side perspective on telework from a descriptive analysis of responses from top executives at 100 large employers in North America with regard to how remote work evolved through the pandemic and how employer response to remote work varied across departments, sectors of operation and their pre-COVID and April 2020 remote work policies.
Hani Mahmassani
W. A. Patterson Chair in Transportation; Director, Northwestern University Transportation Center
February 24, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM
Tectonic shifts in science, technology, and industrial policy: looking ahead
Several factors are converging to drive a new industrial revolution in the U.S and beyond. Advances in manufacturing technologies are reducing costs and lead times as well as creating new industrial capabilities. Companies are rethinking supply chain resilience in the face of global supply chain challenges brought on by the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical crises. And the federal government has passed historic legislation in the past year plus that will lead to billions of public and private-sector investment in key industries such as transportation, semiconductors and clean tech in cities and states across the country. Mindell and Reynolds will discuss the confluence of these developments, their implications for manufacturing, scale up, innovation, and the work of the future and the opportunities they present for the MIT Mobility Initiative and MIT more broadly.
Liz Reynolds & David Mindell
Lecturer, DUSP, MIT; Former Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development at the National Economic Council & MIT Professor, Executive Chairman at Humatics, Co-founder at Unless
March 3, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM
Modelling Sustainable Options - the importance of habit and perceptions
Habit and its potential hysteresis effect, have been recognized as difficult problems in travel demand modelling and forecasting for over 45 years. Past efforts to deal with the problem have included the formulation and estimation of panel data models, including the potential help of shock effects in the series. In the last years, and with the incorporation of techniques borrowed from psychological research, we have been increasingly capable of understanding the role of habit (and also of other latent variables, such as being risk prone or averse or being green or uncaring about the environment), by using hybrid choice models. In this talk, a quick review of these issues will be provided, and also some recent examples of the new approach in the case of modelling bicycle use, car and motorcycle ownership, and motorcycle use.
Juan de Dios Ortuzar
Emeritus Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
March 10, 2023 at 5:00:00 PM
The case against transportation policy priority one being electrified personal cars
At the COP in Glasgow, in the Inflation Reduction Act (the US’s largest infrastructure commitment since Eisenhower), in wealth country subsidies, and in major philanthropic investments, the electrification of personal vehicles has been touted as the single most important way to address CO2 emissions in the transport sector. It’s not. I’ll do a scan of life cycle analyses, the implications for lithium supply, demographics of the planet, and the opportunity to multipurpose investments and then discuss better and more effective policy choices. Promoting quality car-independent lifestyles is paramount.
Robin Chase
co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, Buzzcar and GoLoco
March 17, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM
From Reinforcement Learning to Sequential Decision Analytics with Applications in Transportation and Logistics
Sequential decision problems are an almost universal problem class, spanning dynamic resource allocation problems, control problems, optimal stopping/buy-sell problems, active learning problems, as well as two-agent games and multiagent problems. Application settings span engineering, the sciences, transportation, health services, medical decision making, energy, e-commerce and finance, but in this talk we will emphasize applications in transportation and logistics.
These problems have been addressed in the research literature using a variety of modeling and algorithmic frameworks, including (but not limited to) dynamic programming, stochastic programming, stochastic control, simulation optimization, stochastic search, approximate dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, model predictive control, and even multiarmed bandit problems.
We will present a universal modeling framework that can be used for any sequential decision problem in the presence of different sources of uncertainty, using a “model first” strategy that optimizes over policies for making decisions. We will present four (meta)classes of policies that are the foundation of any solution approach that has ever been proposed for a sequential problem, either in the research literature or used in practice (including policies that have not been invented yet).
We will close by making the case for teaching sequential decision analytics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including to students in fields centered on applications as well as methodology.
Warren Powell
Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Chief Innovation Officer at Optimal Dynamics
March 24, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM
How safe is safe enough for Autonomous Vehicles
A pressing question for deploying autonomous vehicles is: will they be safe enough? The usual answer of "at least as safe as a human driver" (e.g., Positive Risk Balance) is likely to be both too simplistic and much more complex than might be apparent. Which human driver, under what conditions? And are fewer total fatalities OK even if it means more pedestrians die? Who gets to decide what safe enough really means when billions of dollars are on the line? And how will anyone really know the outcome will be as safe as it needs to be when the technology initially deploys without a safety driver?
This talk covers risk acceptance frameworks, what people mean by "safe," setting an acceptable safety goal, measuring safety, accounting for uncertainty, a framework for deciding when to deploy, and a sampling of ethical challenges that must be addressed. The emphasis is not on how to build machine learning based systems, but rather on how to measure whether vehicles based on this technology will be acceptably safe for real-world deployment.
An approach to deployment safety should include at least: a governance model that encompasses stakeholder concerns, a sound safety case, a definition of acceptable risk, an approach to safety engineering, a metrics strategy, an approach to uncertainty management, a defined deployment decision process, a security plan, a safety culture plan, and a plan to address relevant ethical considerations.
Philip Koopman
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Author - How Safe Is Safe Enough? Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety
March 31, 2023 at 4:00:00 PM
FALL 2022
VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehicles
Daniela Rus & Alexander Amini
Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT & Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
October 28, 2022 at 4:00:00 PM
SPRING 2022
FALL 2021
Spring 2021
Part I: Large-scale monitoring and control of multi-modal urban networks
Part II: Research trends in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technology
Nikolas Geroliminis
Editor in Chief, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies; Associate Professor, Urban Transport Systems Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
May 28, 2021
Fall 2020
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