Dr. Christian Claudel (University of Texas)

Join NCTSPM for the last Transportation Speaker Series Event of the Fall semester, featuring Dr. Christian Claudel, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas.

Dr. Claudel will be speaking on the topic of "Network Traffic State Estimation Using Hamilton-Jacobi Equations". This talk describes a framework for solving control and estimation problems in systems modeled by scalar conservation laws with convex flux, with applications to highway traffic flow estimation and control. Using an equivalent Hamilton-Jacobi formulation, we show that the  be solution to the original PDE can be written semi-analytically. Using the properties of the solutions to HJ PDEs, we prove that when the data of the problem is prescribed in piecewise affine form, the constraints of the model are mixed integer linear. This property enables us to solve arbitrary network state estimation problems involving any type of measurement data (density, flow, velocity and travel time) exactly and efficiently. This framework is applied to a network traffic state estimation problem involving experimental data.

Christian Claudel is an Assistant Professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT-Austin. He received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from UC-Berkeley in 2010, and the MS degree in Plasma Physics from Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 2004. He received the Leon Chua Award from UC-Berkeley in 2010 for his work on the Mobile Millennium traffic monitoring system. His research interests include control and estimation of distributed parameter systems, wireless sensor networks and unmanned aerial vehicles.