Webinars

The Promise and the Challenge of Advanced Air Mobility

ABSTRACT: Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) operations – characterized by electric and hybrid aircraft, and highly-automated operations – are expected to dramatically transform the way in which we transport people and goods, as well as our ability to sense our world from the sky. The deployment of new vehicle types, business models, and aircraft operators will increase competition for already constrained airspace resources. Consequently, fairness and privacy, in addition to the traditional goal of efficiency, will become important considerations. In this talk, I will discuss emerging AAM traffic management challenges, and some of our initial work in overcoming them and realizing the promise of Advanced Air Mobility.

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Warehouse Software: What to Know to Conduct Impactful Research

ABSTRACT: Join us for a panel discussion, in which we will explore the following questions and more:  What is the current state of Warehouse Management Systems, Warehouse Execution Platforms, and specialized warehouse software in practice?  What type of information could a researcher assume would be available as an input to a warehouse algorithm?  What general knowledge or technology gap areas exist in making advances in these software?  Why? How can the INFORMS community work to help bridge this gap? 

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Autonomous Vehicles’ Impacts on Americans’ Long-distance  Travel Choices

ABSTRACT: Self-driving or “autonomous” vehicles (AVs) will have passenger travel, freight trade, and emissions impacts. AVs and shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) are expected to increase vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) by shifting some air travel to relatively long ground trips and adding more vehicle-trips to all roadways (including trips by those presently unable to drive). A Year 2020 survey of 1,004 Americans explored long-distance travel choices with and without AV options, and was coupled with the recent National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) dataset (for trips over 75 miles each way) and the rJourney synthetic trip data set (for US passenger trips over 50 miles each way).

This presentation will explain how count models to predict travel-party size (persons per long-distance trip) show long commute trips, business and shopping trips (and those destined for more population-dense destinations) carrying fewer persons than those for personal, social/recreational, school, and medical reasons (after controlling for trip distance, respondent demographics, and other factors). Younger, more educated, full-time workers and male drivers are more likely to select AVs and SAVs for their long-distance trips (everything else constant). Nationwide destination-zone choices depend on trip purpose and land use attributes at the trip end (as well as travel costs, across modes). Applications of rJourney’s 1.17 billion long-distance passenger trip data (synthetic for Year 2010) suggest that AVs and SAVs will eventually dominate U.S. passenger travel between 100 and 500 miles (one-way), person-trip distance averages will rise nearly 10 percent, and domestic passenger-miles by air will fall by over 50 percent, ceteris paribus, for an overall 6.7% reduction in domestic passenger-miles travelled (relative to a “business as usual”/no-AVs trend scenario). 

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The national vision for advanced aerial mobility is an airspace system that can support high-scale flight operations supporting any number of applications, using vehicles small and large, carrying passengers or cargo, and operating over cities or in remote areas. This vision will require greater aircraft and air traffic management (ATM) system autonomy; a synergistic relationship between vertiport locations and flight trajectories to address noise, privacy, and safety concerns; and new certification standards for vehicles, systems, and operators. To this end, I will discuss how the first two challenges may be addressed via simulation and optimization, and present prior and ongoing work on frameworks, algorithms, and policies for autonomous decision-making during approach and landing; highly automated multi-aircraft conflict resolution; and trajectory planning to maximize the mission efficiency, success and survivability of autonomous flight vehicles. I will also propose a framework for the certification of vehicles that must both operate and make decisions autonomously.

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Constructing a Resilient Global Port Network Toward Secure Global Supply Chains

Ports are critical components of the global supply chain, providing key connections between land- and maritime-based transport modes. They operate in cooperative, but competitive, co-opetitive, environments wherein the throughput of individual ports is linked through an underlying transshipment network. The ports, as well as supporting rail and roadway system infrastructures, however, are by the nature of their designs and locations inherently vulnerable to rising sea levels, significant precipitation events, storm surges and consequent coastal flooding. They are increasingly automated and, thus, greatly reliant on power and communications technologies. They are also subject to other disruptive events of natural or anthropogenic causes. Investments, thus, are needed to protect this intermodal (IM) system from such disruptive forces, and protective actions are required for business continuity during and immediately following a disruption. This presentation proposes optimization, equilibrium and digital twinning techniques for developing multi-stakeholder, protective investment, and response strategies aimed at enhancing resilience of this marine-based IM system to disruption and securing our global supply chains.

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Cobotic Order Picking Systems

The new generation of warehouses will be fully robotized. However, in the nearby future, robots will gradually find their way into the operations and will have to work in close collaboration with manual workers. In my talk, I will discuss two types of cobotic order picking systems, where robots and order pickers work together to fill customer orders: drive-on cobots and walk-along cobots. I will discuss empirical, experiment-based work on the impact on pick performance of robots leading versus robots following the pickers, and analytical modelling research on control strategies and collaboration strategies. Our results show that, with proper deployment, cobots may lead to a substantial increase in picking performance.

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Traffic Management and Control in Fully Automated Vehicle Environment

In this talk, we present rhythmic traffic control, a new paradigm of controlling vehicles to traverse a traffic facility such as a signal-free intersection and a traffic network, in a fully automated vehicle (AV) environment. The fundamental idea of rhythmic control is to determine an underlying beat for the traffic facility and then require AVs to follow the beat and a design speed to enter and traverse the facility; the start of the beat for each conflicting movement is carefully synchronized so that vehicles will pass through a conflict point in an alternating and collision-free manner without any stop. We show that this new control paradigm is simple, but yields superior performance compared with previous paradigms or proposals, and is computationally tractable and thus scalable.

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On-Demand Multimodal Transit Systems: Capturing Travel Mode Adoption and Assessing Resilience

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