Authored by Sheng'ao Xie, USC Master of Planning, 2016

On January 22, USC Professor Ketan Savla received a 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) career award of $500,000 to fund his research proposal, Control Design for Dynamical Network Flows with Applications to Transportation.  Savla's project will develop an integrated research and education program on rigorous control design for intelligent infrastructure networks, with an emphasis on transportation.

"The most exciting part is that I view this award as a positive feedback from my research community on my vision of using tools from controls, dynamical Systems and optimization to tackle this problem," said Savla.  "I appreciate the longer term commitment of resources, which will allow me to investigate the issues in sufficient depth."

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award recognizes excellence in research ability and education, and an integration of education and research within the context of the mission of the applicant's organization.  "The CAREER Program is one of the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards given to junior faculty to further their role as teacher-scholars," explains Dr. Maged Dessouky, USC Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering.  "Professor Savla's project on Control Design for Dynamical Network Flows with Applications to Transportation has the potential to make major advances in traffic signaling through dynamic control.

Beyond its immediate emphasis on dynamical network flows, Savla's project aims to develop elements of robust control theory for networked dynamical systems.  "Infrastructure, or lifeline, networks provide a rich context to develop the next phase of figorous network science.  Given the high social and economic importance of these networks, their efficient and resilient operation is of great practical significance.  Savla notes, "The increasing penetration of smart devices in these networks, allowing real-time data collection and decision making, and the high level of interdependencies, makes this an extremely challenging problem."

Speaking more specifically about his plans and integration with his METRANS research, Savla added, “Los Angeles is a living testbed for many of the problems I plan to investigate in this project, particularly in the context of transportation.  I plan to generate case studies for integrated corridor management in the context of Los Angeles, as concrete illustrations of the research under this project.  This will also be aligned with the Research Initiation Award that I received from METRANS recently, for which I am grateful too.”

Dr. Ketan Savla is an Assistant Professor at Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with courtesy appointments in Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California.  He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007.  Before joining USC, Savla was a research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT.  His current research interest is in developing control and optimization tools for complex dynamical networks, multi-agent systems, and human-in-the-loop systems.