Natural and man-made disruptive events can have major impact on our transportation system.  These events range from simple traffic accidents to major loss of infrastructure as a result of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes.  The major goal of transportation agencies is to make sure that the affected transportation system continues to operate at an acceptable level of service under the threat of such events.  This can be achieved by developing and deploying effective on and off line incident and emergency management plans.  In this presentation, we will use real-world examples to illustrate major issues related to incident / emergency operations and their planning and real-time management.  Then, modeling needs will be discussed with the goal of focusing on emerging issues such as data driven dynamic forecasting models and real-time control, use of on-line traffic data, role of feedback mechanisms, effect of uncertainties and cascading failures, and real-world implementation.  Application examples will be from the Greater NY/NJ metropolitan area where Hurricanes Irene and Sandy increased the awareness of the need for such comprehensive decision support systems.

Human decision-making during evacuation and loss of network capacity will be presented as major sources of uncertainty that need to be incorporated into dynamic traffic models.  Mathematical models developed to capture these uncertainties and their introduction into the network assignment will also be discussed. The computational and theoretical challenges of using this new type of probabilistic modeling approach for real-time decision-making will be presented. 

The talk will be concluded with the discussion of some of the most promising future directions and opportunities for effective planning and management of real-time incident and emergency operations as a result of the emergence of disruptive technologies such as big data, AI and machine learning, and connected / autonomous vehicles among others.

 Biographical Sketch

K. Ozbay joined Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) as a tenured full Professor at NYU on August 2013.  He is currently the Director of the C2SMART Center (Tier 1 UTC funded by USDOT).  Prior to that Professor Ozbay was a tenured full Professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering where he joined as an Assistant Professor in July 1996. In 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) Department at, Princeton University.

Professor Ozbay has more than 30 years of expertise in transportation and traffic engineering.  His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including the development of simulation models of large networks with connected and autonomous vehicles, advanced technology and sensing applications for Intelligent Transportation Systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management systems, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics.

Dr. Ozbay is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. His research interests in transportation cover a wide range of topics including data analytics for advanced technology and sensing applications in smart cities, development of simulation models of large scale complex transportation systems, modeling and evaluation of traffic incident and emergency management, feedback based on-line real-time traffic control techniques, traffic safety, application of operations research techniques in network optimization and humanitarian inventory control, and transportation economics. He has co-authored 4 books and published approximately 400 refereed papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Ozbay is also an Associate Editor of the ITS journal. Dr. Ozbay is the co-editor of a book titled “Dynamic Traffic Control & Guidance” published by Springer Verlag’s "Complex Social, Economic and Engineered Networks" series in 2013. He also serves as the Associate Editor of Networks and Spatial Economic journal and Transportmetrica B: Transportation Dynamics journal.

Since 1994, Dr. Ozbay, has been the Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator of 100 projects funded at a level of more than $25,00,000 by National Science Foundation, NJDOT, NYMTC, NY State DOT, New Jersey Highway Authority, USDOT, FHWA, VDOT, CUNY University Transportation Research Center (UTRC), Department of Homeland Security, USDOT ITS Research Center of Excellence.

Food systems are among the most complex devised by humankind, involving the integration of many stages that include Production, Marketing and Distribution, Acquisition, Preparation & Consumption, and downstream impacts of wastes and their management. These integrated stages comprise the food life cycle. Interactions among these stages define a series of interactions that convey critical materials (raw materials, calories and nutrients, waste, energy, water), and information (capital and regulatory influences) throughout the system.

 In general, the means of production of the food system are located in rural regions, while most consumption takes place in urban areas. This urban-rural connection accentuates how the demand for food affects embedded water and energy on a continental and global scale. The majority of research addressing food interactions has focused on the “production” part of the food cycle, examining a wide variety of technological and management options. Considerably less attention has been paid to the dietary preferences of consumers, yet the available literature makes clear that there are significant opportunities to redefine resource requirements and food cycle interactions through integration of the “consumption” and “wastage” part of the food cycle with production. Such an integrated approach has the added value of directly linking the food nexus with human and ecosystem health. For example, were consumers to consume foods closer to the recommended dietary guidelines, water requirements related to food consumption would decline by as much as 30%, and agriculturally-related release of nutrients by 40%.

A complicating issue is the emergence of “food insecure” populations (estimated to be 49 million in the U.S.), in areas where the acquisition of healthy food alternatives is impeded through lack of viable markets and poor transportation alternatives. These areas are largely concentrated in urban minority communities. Thus, it is worth examining how environmental impacts of food consumption across demographics correlate with ethnicity and household spending in the United States. Grains, protein, dairy, fruits, and vegetables are identified as major food groups for cradle-to-farm-gate land, GHG, and water impacts, and reveal significant differences among these impacts for different minority groups. Food impact expense rates further define how Black, Latinx, and White households affect the physical environment through demographically-specific food consumption as well as purchasing behavior.

Findings suggest that reducing food spending and consumption of environmentally-intense foods within the protein and grains food groups could result in the highest conservation of cradle-to-farm-gate land and water resources, whereas reducing protein and dairy food spending and consumption could mitigate the most GHG emissions. Findings also suggest that different messaging relevant to particular demographic groups may be necessary to encourage healthier and lower-impact dietary choices. These findings and results are critical in providing practitioners, policy makers, and researchers with policy relevant insights and data that influence environmental and racial equity matters.

Biographical Sketch

Thomas L. Theis is Professor of Civil and Materials Engineering and Director of the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy (IESP) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. IESP focuses on the development of new cross-disciplinary research initiatives in the environmental area. He started his faculty career at Clarkson University, where he was the Bayard D. Clarkson Professor and Director of the Center for Environmental Management. He is past editor of the Journal of Environmental Engineering and served on the Chartered Science Advisory Board of the USEPA from 2000-2009. His areas of expertise include the mathematical modeling and systems analysis of environmental processes, industrial pollution prevention, industrial ecology, material flow analysis and life cycle assessment, the environmental chemistry of trace organic and inorganic substances, interfacial reactions, subsurface contaminant transport, and hazardous waste management.