We are pleased to announce that a new study of real-time truck driver management, funded by METRANS Transportation Center and the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), was published in February 2016. Conducted by METRANS researchers Dr. Burkhard Englert, Dr. Mehrdad Aliasgari, and Dr. Shadnaz Asgari from the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Long Beach, the study introduces a mobile application researchers developed to track truck movements near the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. The app is also intended to help increase efficiency in container sorting and avoid the additional cost of using extra equipment.

Trucks that visit ports to drop off or pick up containers usually need to wait in queues outside port gates and inside terminals. In this project, researchers developed a mobile application that would allow port terminal managers to foresee incoming traffic volume and plan more efficiently for shipments. The app collects geolocation information from truck drivers' smartphones. A compatible authorization system is designed to enable secure registration of truck drivers through trucking companies. All information collected through the app is shared among trucking companies and terminal managers on an as-needed basis. This means terminal managers are only granted access to traffic and container location information that pertains to their particular task.

This app has the potential to extend its capabilities to help freight management. Potential expansions researchers are considering include collecting cargo shipment information to create optimized routes when trucks approach port terminals and creating an online chatting function, which will allow operators, truck drivers and trucking company managers to share information about traffic and their trucks' locations.

A two-page summary of the report can be found here.

The full report can be found here.

Burkhard Englert

Burkhard Englert is a professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at California State University Long Beach. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut in 2000. His doctoral research was in the area of computability theory (recursion theory) and dealt with lattice embeddings into the computably enumerable degrees. He also worked on distributed algorithms. In 1992, he received a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Tübingen in Germany. Dr. Englert's research interests are distributed computing, distributed algorithms, computer security, and transportation network modeling and optimization. He also serves as a reviewer and a member of program committees for a number of national and international conferences.

Mehrdad Aliasgari

Dr. Mehrdad Aliasgari joined the faculty of the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department in 2013, after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and his M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Notre Dame. Dr. Aliasgari's research area is mainly computer security and applied cryptography. Particularly he focuses on privacy-preserving computation and outsourcing, verifiable and secure outsourcing and storage of data, private biometric and genomic computation and cloud security. His dissertation was entitled "Secure Computation and Outsourcing of Biometric Data". He developed the first efficient solution on secure multiparty floating point computation which has numerous applications in the field of secure computation and outsourcing. He teaches computer security and cryptography courses at California State University, Long Beach.

Shadnaz Asgari

Dr. Shadnaz Asgari received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. During her Ph.D. studies, she was involved in multidisciplinary research conducted at UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). From 2008 to 2010, she was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA medical school (Neural System and Dynamics Lab) where she received extensive training in the field of biomedical data analysis. Following the completion of her PostDoc, she became a full-time researcher at the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery and continued conducting multidisciplinary research in signal processing and data mining for the purpose of improvement of the health care of patients with brain-related disorders. She joined the faculty of Computer Engineering and Computer Science department at California State University, Long Beach in fall 2012. Dr. Asgari is the recipient of 2011 UCLA BIRC (Brain Injury Research Center) young investigator award and has authored/co-authored more than 30 journal and conference papers.

Writer Kaitlyn (Kenan) Zhang

Kaitlyn is a first-year MPP student at Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her interest is in transportation policy, urban development and public economics. She is also working towards a certificate in Transportation Systems from the Viterbi School of Engineering.