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For three straight years, the Texas A&M University student ITE chapter, TAMUite has won the best student chapter and the Traffic Bowl Competition in Texas District, this year at the April ITE conference in Lubbock.  The TAMUite is heading to the international Traffic Bowl competition in Portland, OR in August 2023.

Congratulations to the team and all the students involved.  Thank you to all those earlier students who mentored and helped the team, Texas ITE chapter and private firms for the kind financial support.

 

In the recently announced University Transportation Center awards by the U.S. Department of Transportation 2023 under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of the Congress, the group was fortunate to be part of two University Transportation Centers:

• Center for Freight Transportation for Efficient and Resilient Supply Chain (FERSC) led by the University of Tennessee Knoxville (Announcement)
• Maritime Transportation Research & Education Center (MarTREC) led by the University of Arkansas

Appreciation was due to the lead PIs of the two Centers for including the group in the big efforts, as well as to our colleague support through various means. The funding will allow to carry out research with significant implications, specifically in the area of multimodal transportation and freight logistics/supply chain efficiency and resiliency through collaboration with stakeholders @ the regional, state and federal levels that would otherwise not be as easy to conduct . The funding would also benefit graduate and undergraduate education in recruitment of high caliber or under-represented students and in support of outreach and other extramural activities.

On the afternoon of September 22, 2022, Ahmad successfully defended his PhD dissertation. His dissertation was on modeling waterway based multimodal network maintenance project selection to maximize the system benefits while considering stochastic shoaling effect. He will soon be called Dr. Mahmoudzadeh. Ahmad will be joining our Texas A&M University Galveston campus as a lecturer soon. Congratulations to Ahmad! Our best wishes to his future career!

On September 2, 2022, Chaolun Ma successfully defended his PhD dissertation. The dissertation is on network signal control with intersection flow weighted differential queues (so called back pressure method) enhanced by reinforcement learning. The so called back pressure method is derived from a Lyapunov function defined as the summation of squared queue lengths. Chaolun was able to unify several methods in intersection traffic control under the umbrella of the Lyapunov function system.  His back pressure method coupled with reinforcement learning proves to be exceptionally efficient! Chaolun has decided to take on an industry job in data analytics. Congratulations to Chaolun! Wish Chaolun the best in his future career!

Dr. Wang and his collaborators have just published a paper on waterway maintenance projects optimization, after years effort! Thank you to the collaborators, reviewers and editors for the patience and support.