Event Type: Seminar

The carriage of cargo (mail and freight) was the initial focus of the fledgling commercial airline industry from the 1920s onwards. Carrying passengers emerged as the basis for airline operations in the 1930s in both Europe and North America. The COVID pandemic has decimated passenger traffic around the world. Airlines have returned to their origins to remain in business by carrying cargo in all-cargo freighters, in ‘preighters’ and in the belly holds of un-converted passenger planes. The presentation will examine the changes in the air cargo industry since the 1970s when the likes of FedEx disrupted the industry through the different stages and challenges which have culminated in the dominance of cargo in the international commercial aviation.

Mr. Edwards has over 50 years in the transportation, distribution, and logistics industry. He began his career as a truck driver in Toronto. Since then, he has worked in international freight forwarding in Canada and the UAE, numerous sectors of the airline industry, aviation design and manufacturing in Germany and the United States, ocean freight, rail management, economic development, and education. His career which has taken around the world has given him a deep appreciation of different cultures and business structures.

Charles Edwards joined Strategic Aviation Solutions International (SASI) in 2020 to focus on Learning and Development programs. SASI is engaged in global consulting and management services for airlines, airports, international trade organizations, and financial institutions. He is a member of the team which created and delivers the Safe Supply Chain course for the International Civil Aviation Organization, is project lead for the United Nations sponsored Cross Border Management – digital trade facilitation project and is Co-Principal Investigator of ACRP 03-63 – update to airport air cargo planning guidelines.

Prior to joining SASI, Mr. Edwards was the founding Director of the Office of Logistics + Freight at the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Director of the North Carolina Center for Global Logistics within the North Carolina Community College System.

Edwards’ aviation experience includes managing a commercial airport, member of a team which created and operated four allcargo airlines including UPS Airlines, operational introduction of a composite baggage container, and leadership of the team which designed one of the world’s largest air vehicles.

Edwards holds degrees from universities in Canada, England, and the United States. He serves on boards and committees in freight transport, research, and logistics education. Mr. Edwards is a Professor of the Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He is a Scholar Fellow of the beta chapter of Sigma Chi Mu Tau (Supply Chain).

Transportation is vital. The Supreme Court has recognized the right to travel as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Given this important role, it would be expected that policymakers would battle over transportation policy. Too often, however, those battles are fought over what specific projects will be funded and in which states or congressional districts, and scant attention is paid to larger social and economic effects. This presentation highlights several challenges faced in achieving transportation equity.

Tom Sanchez earned his PhD in City Planning from Georgia Tech and is a Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech in the National Capital Region (Washington, DC/Northern Virginia). He conducts research in the areas of transportation, social justice, technology, and scholarly impact. His most recent books, Networks in the Knowledge Economy (with Denise Bedford) was published in 2021 and Planning Knowledge and Research, was published by Routledge in 2018. He has co-authored three other books including, Planning as if People Matter: Governing for Social Equity (2012), The Right to Transportation: Moving to Equity (2007), and The Social Impacts of Urban Containment (2007).

We strongly coupled PDE-ODE systems modelling the influence of controlled single vehicles or platoons on the surrounding road traffic. The models consist of a conservation law with discontinuous flux describing the main traffic evolution and ODEs accounting for the trajectories of the slower vehicles, which depend on the downstream traffic conditions. The moving constraint is operated by an inequality on the flux, which accounts for the bottleneck created on the road by the presence of the controlled vehicles. We present a finite volume scheme able to capture exactly the non-classical discontinuities that may arise at the constraint position. Optimal control problems for traffic management are then addressed numerically.
Dr. Paola Goatin is currently Research Director at Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée and leader of the project-team ACUMES (Analysis and Control of Unsteady Models for Engineering Sciences). Before joining Inria in 2010, she held an Associate Professor position at Toulon University. She got her PhD in Applied Mathematics from SISSA-ISAS (Italy) and her Habilitation in Mathematics from Toulon University .Paola Goatin is an expert of analysis and numerical simulation of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, with special focus on traffic flow applications. From 2010 to 2016 she held an ERC Starting Grant on “Traffic Management by Macroscopic models”. In 2014, she was awarded the Inria – Académie des Sciences prize for young researchers. She is author of more than 70 articles published on international journals and 25 conference proceedings.

This presentation will introduce a real-time traffic signal control algorithm that utilized trajectory information obtained from connected vehicles. Vehicle-to-infrastructure communications are assumed to provide the location of all connected vehicles near the signalized intersection at regular intervals in time. This information is used to identify the presence of traditional (i.e., non-connected) vehicles that are stopped at the intersection and to group all connected and identified traditional vehicles into naturally occurring platoons. Signal phasing and timing plans are then selected to optimize the sequence that these platoons are able to discharge through the intersection to minimize average delay incurred by all identified vehicles. Several heuristic methods, including intelligent tree search and multiple types of genetic algorithms, are proposed to solve the optimization problem.
Ilgin Guler is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include multi-modal urban traffic operations and control, intelligent transportation systems, connected and autonomous vehicles and infrastructure management. She received dual B.S. degrees from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in Civil Engineering and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in Civil and Environmental Engineering. After completing her Ph.D., she served as a post-doctoral scholar in the Institute of Transport Systems and Planning at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Spatial data and methods are widely integrated with transportation studies. In addition, emerging data science approaches are increasingly integrated with transportation research to generate data driven solutions to complex problems. This talk explores the applications of spatial and data science approaches in urban transportation research. It provides case studies on spatial data modelling applications used to identify and understand the sustainability of the vehicular transport system. Then, it explores how data mining approaches can be integrated with transport modelling to study traffic signal optimization. Finally, it discusses the potential of innovative spatial data science methods when studying active travel in data scare contexts.

Dr. S.M. Labib is a Research Associate at Centre for Diet and Activity Research, at the University of Cambridge. His primary research focuses on developing novel quantitative spatial analytical approaches associated with geographic information science, spatial data science in studying urban built environment, and transport health impact modelling. He utilizes spatial analytics in transport-health modelling to explore the influence of the built environment and active transportation (e.g., cycling) on health outcomes.