Adylbek Abdykalikov, USC, IPPAM 2020

In January 2019, Pouyan Hosseini, USC Viterbi PhD Candidate presented his research at doctoral student seminar on “Transportation Operations and Traffic Control” at the 2019 Annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) Meeting in Washington, DC. This year’s annual TRB Meeting attracted more than 13,000 transportation professionals from around the world and included more than 5,000 presentations in nearly 800 sessions and workshops, addressing topics of interest to policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions.

“TRB annual meeting is a great opportunity to meet the people in Transportation Engineering field both from academia and industry,” noted Hosseini.  “It gives you the chance to get to know the top-notch research in your area of interest and is one of the best places to network with other professionals.”

Hosseini is a PhD candidate at USC Viterbi where he has been performing research under supervision of Dr. Ketan Savla since he joined the program in 2014. His research is on analysis and control of traffic flow on urban traffic systems and on developing optimization tools to improve the performance of signalized arterial networks. To that end, Hosseini has been developing distributed algorithms for adaptive traffic signal control inspired by scheduling algorithms from data network. His work also includes evaluating performance of such adaptive controllers through extensive microscopic traffic simulations. More specifically, he recently performed a case study on evaluating the performance of these controllers on a downtown Los Angeles sub-network (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd9T29vi75Y).

“My research is on application of information technology in decision making for transportation systems,” he shared.  “Recent studies show that the average US commuter spends 42 hours in traffic per year and loses $1,400 idling away gas. My research is very practical in the sense that it can improve the quality of daily life. Making the traffic lights smarter, helps improve the urban mobility and enhance the traffic condition in the cities. That means less time spent idling in traffic and less frustration for commuters, less fuel consumption and less air pollution.”

Hosseini obtained his Master’s degree from Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at USC, his Bachelor’s. degree from University of Tehran, and was the recipient of California Transportation Foundation Heckeroth Scholarship award in 2017. He has served as technical reviewer for Automatica Journal, American Control Conference and IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems.

About the Author:

Adylbek Abdykalikov is a graduate student of International Public Policy and Management Program at USC Price. He has working experience in various positions at the Ministries of Transport and Communication and Investment and Development of Kazakhstan and was in charge of Transportation and Civil Aviation policy development and implementation.