On May 10th, 2017, in Room A928 ofthe New Main Building, Dr. Ronghui Liu, an Associate Professor of Institute forTransport Studies, University of Leeds, and a well-known scholar in the fieldof traffic microsimulation, was invited to give a lecture entitled"Dynamical Models of Route Choice and Signal Control". The lecturewas hosted by Associate professor Tianliang Liu. More than 20 audiencesattended, including professors, graduate and undergraduate students from Schoolof Economics and Management and School of Transportation Science andEngineering, Beihang university.
Dynamic transport models involvingtravellers’ choices (including repeated route choices) and traffic signalcontrols have been developed to: (a) predict (for a given responsive controlstrategy) how traffic flows and controls are likely to evolve over time and soto help assess the performance of different given control strategies; and (b)design new control strategies for reducing congestion and traffic pollution (orother criteria) in cities, taking reasonable account of future evolution oftraffic flows as these respond to the control strategies.
In this lecture, Prof. Liuintroduced a dynamical system involving interactions between a responsivetraffic control system (where the system updates signal timings in the light ofcurrent average flows and delays) and drivers’ route choice decisions (whichare assumed to switch routes toward better routes, in light of current averagedelays). She considered the stability of the dynamical system theoretically andexplored the system in a simulated real-life environment. And also, Prof. Liuconducted a further discussion with the audiences about the advances in fieldof microsimulation and traffic dynamics and future collaborative researchopportunities.
Dr Ronghui Liu is an AssociateProfessor and the Director of International Activities at the Institute forTransport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds, UK. She received her BSc fromPeking University and PhD from Cambridge University. Before joining ITS Leeds,she was a Research Fellow at University College London, and while at ITS, shewas seconded to head the Transport Modelling Division at TRL, UK in 2005. Sheserved as an Associate Editor for journal IEEE Transaction on IntelligentTransportation Systems, and Member of Editorial Board of IET Journal ofIntelligent Transport. Her research areas span a number of themes in the fieldof transport studies: in vehicle dynamics and traffic microsimulaton modeldevelopments; in traffic control theory and algorithms; in travel behaviour andIntelligent mobility; in stochastic models and reliability analysis; in publictransport operations and controls; in timetabling and schedule coordination;and in train control and railway traffic management systems. She isparticularly interested in the interrelationships between these themes, andmethodologies for estimation, design and evaluation of their network-wide effects.
