Nash-Stackelberg games in transportation networks: leveraging the power of smartphones for traffic monitoring and management

Dr. Alexandre Bayen

Video

Abstract:

The first part of this talk investigates the problem of real-time estimation and control of distributed parameters systems in the context of monitoring traffic with smartphones. The recent explosion of smartphones with internet connectivity, GPS and accelerometers is rapidly increasing sensing capabilities for numerous infrastructure systems. The talk will present theoretical results, algorithms and implementations designed to integrate mobile measurements obtained from smartphones into distributed parameter models of traffic. The models considered include Hamilton-Jacobi equations, first order conservation laws and systems of conservation laws. Other techniques developed will be briefly presented as well, relying on ensemble Kalman filtering.

In the second part of the talk, a game theoretic framework is developed to study Stackelberg routing games on parallel networks with horizontal queues, applicable to transportation networks. First, a new class of latency functions to model congestion with horizontal queues is introduced. Then, for this class of latency, the Stackelberg routing game is studied: assuming that a central authority can incentivize the routes of a subset of the players on a network, and that the remaining players choose their routes selfishly, can one compute an optimal route assignment (optimal Stackelberg strategy) that minimizes the total cost? A simple strategy is proposed, the Non-Compliant First (NCF) strategy, that can be computed in polynomial time. The strategy is showed to be optimal. It is also showed to be robust, in the sense that some perturbations of the NCF strategy are still optimal strategies.

The results will be illustrated using a traffic monitoring system launched jointly by UC Berkeley and Nokia, called Mobile Millennium, which is operational in Northern California and streams more than 60 million data points a day into traffic models. The talk will also present a new program recently launched in California, called the Connected Corridor program, which will prototype and pilot California's next generation traffic management infrastructure.