During the past two decades, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has invested heavily in researching, piloting, and demonstrating that Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) strategies and systems are a viable alternative to mitigating congestion when lane expansion is not possible. The vision of ICM is that transportation networks will realize significant improvements in the efficient movement of people and goods through institutional collaboration and aggressive, proactive integration of existing infrastructure along major corridors.

This project will improve the ability to build artificial intelligence algorithms for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that incorporate communications technologies by developing methods of learning from simulation environments. The specific application area is connected and automated vehicles (CAV) that drive strategically to reduce stop-and-go traffic. 

The CIRCLES Website https://circles-consortium.github.io contains more detailed information on this project. 

Widespread use of automation in many sectors of society has yielded a large amount of data regarding historical behaviors for a variety of dynamical systems, such as unmanned aerial, marine, and ground vehicles, biological systems, and weather systems. This project aims to develop novel algorithms to discover governing rules that explain the observed behaviors (i.e., trajectories) of dynamical systems. Discovery of underlying models, while useful for analysis and control, can be computationally challenging.

Transportation accounts for 28% of the total energy use in the United States and as such, it is responsible for immense environmental impact, including urban air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and may pose a severe threat to energy security. As we encourage mode shift from personal vehicles to public transit, it is important to consider that public transit systems still require substantial amounts of energy; for example, public bus transit services in the U.S. are responsible for at least 19.7 million metric tons of CO2 emission annually.

Public transportation infrastructure is an essential component in cultivating equitable communities. However, public transit agencies have historically struggled to achieve this since they are often severely stressed in terms of resources as they have to make the trade-off between concentrating service into routes that serve large numbers of people and spreading service out to ensure that people everywhere have access to at least some service.