Dr. Haowen Xu
Research Scientist
Oak Ridge National Lab
Friday, September 1, 2023
1:50-2:40pm Tickle 500
Abstract:
Urban mobility management entails complex decision-making processes that involve multiple urban management aspects and require advanced capabilities for real-time collection and analysis of urban big data. Many recent studies use advanced information and communication technologies to create innovative mobility management paradigms and next-generation intelligent transportation systems by building smart city applications. The emerging digital twin technology can provide the unique advantages of handling large volumes and varieties of urban data to facilitate complex predictive analytics. This seminar talk presents our research that bridges digital twin technology with various transportation and mobility management applications to support urban congestion mitigation, traffic co-simulations, and autonomous vehicle research. Through several case studies, this talk first introduces a digital twin application developed to enable real-time situational awareness of traffic dynamics and optimize traffic controls in the city of Chattanooga. Then, a mobile computing application powered with digital twin technologies to provide drivers and automated vehicles with speed advisory through the concept of cyber-physical control will be discussed. The application aims to reduce the urban stop-and-go traffic pattern through intelligent speed optimization algorithms and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technologies. Afterward, we present a novel digital twin city application that creates realistic virtual reality environments to facilitate driver training and vehicle technology testing using co-simulations in laboratory environments. This talk shares our insights, experiences, and practices for developing comprehensive and robust digital twin applications to shed light on urban smart mobility management.
Bio:
Dr. Haowen Xu is a research scientist in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Haowen Xu received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a graduate certificate in Geoinformatics at the University of Iowa in 2019. Before that, he got his M.S. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Iowa in 2015. His research interests focus on developing cyberinfrastructure, digital twins, visual analytical dashboards, mobile edge computing apps, Virtual Reality (VR) serious games, and cyber-physical systems to facilitate the planning and management, experimental research, and data and model-driven analytics in the environmental and urban science sectors. He has successfully designed and developed many research software and mobile/web applications for a number of projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO), and Building Technologies Office (BTO), and other federal agencies, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). His domain interests include smart cities, intelligent transportation systems, smart buildings, human modeling, and water resources management (e.g., erosion and sediment transport, watershed planning, and hazard mitigation).
Dr. Xu has authored and co-authored over 15 journal publications, including several premier journals such as IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation, Science of the Total Environment, Environmental Modelling & Software, Journal of Environmental Management, and Journal of Hydrology. He has also received research awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (IEEE-MASS), the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), and the American Water Resources Association (AWRA). He is a co-organizer of the ACM-SIGSPATIAL’s International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (IWCTS), and he has been invited to present his research at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), and U.S. Army Engineer Institute for Water Resources (IWR).