Prof. Haijun Huang in our school is a leading expert on transportation science. He wasawarded by Outstanding Contribution Prize of Fudan Management in 2012. Recently he accepted the interview by Phoenix TV, and talked about the following issues:
Transportation science and himself
Prof. Haijun Huang started his research on transportation research when he was a postgraduate in system engineering and operational research inBeihang University in 1984. In 1992, hisstudy, “A combined trip distribution and assignment model for multiple user classes”, published on “Transportation Research Part B”, atop journal in transportation science. The result of this work wassuccessfullyapplied to the real transportation network in Kowloon of Hongkong. In the same year, his two other works, collaborated with researchers in Hongkong, also published on “Transportation Research Part B”. Itwasan amazing achievement to have 3 publications in such a top journal in one single year, especiallythathe was only 28 yearsoldthat year.
Till now, Haijun Huang has published 23 papers on “Transportation Research”. Over 130paperof his are SCI indexed, and his work has been cited over 800 times by SCI indexed journals.
Challenging task
Traffic congestion is really a challenging problem to everyone and our government, especially to the super city of Beijing. “I feel fun to find out the reason behind the problem. How does congestion come? When I found a way to model it and explain it, andthe workwasapprovalby the international leading experts, I felt the happiest”said Haijun Huang.
Since 1995, Haijun Huang hasbeen worked on congestion pricing problem in urban transportation networks. He said“In welfare economics, road in the city is a kind of scarce resource, and we should use such resource in an efficient way. Pricing provides a good way to coordinate the traffic.”Actually congestion pricing policies have been adopted by many cities around the world, such as London,Oslo, and Singapore. Haijun Huang and his research team have made many innovative progresses in this field. Their studies involved public transport, carpooling, intelligent transport and air pollution control into congestion pricing research, and develop acompetitive system of transit and highwaywith heterogeneous users. Recently, they built up new equilibrium and system optimum models with multi-class users, and provided more in-depth knowledge to the pricing theory. Their results showed that, with strict analysis and scientific design, congestion pricing can significantly improve the congested situationin urban network.
But it is not easy to let the public to understand and accept pricing. People may think it is ridiculous to charge the road, since urban roads are public. “Thus it is of vital importance to let the public know how the government uses the money gained from congestion pricing, and how to payitback to the public.”
The way to do research
Haijun Huang said a good supervisor should give students a good environment. He neverforceshis studentsto study, but his own working ethics give a good example how to do research.
“There is no end of research. The key is to be patient. To solve the congestion problem, we can never do the best, as we can always do better. This is also what I aim to do.”SaidHaijun Huang.
