CISE Seminar: Andreas Malikopoulos, Cornell University

Date: Friday, October 6, 2023
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: 665 Commonwealth Avenue, CDS 1101

Andreas Malikopoulos
Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
Cornell University

A Traveler-Centric Mobility Game Under Rationality and Prospect Theory
Emerging mobility systems, e.g., connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), and shared mobility, provide the most intriguing opportunity for enabling users to better monitor transportation network conditions and make better decisions for improving safety and transportation efficiency. It is expected that CAVs will gradually penetrate the market and interact with human-driven vehicles in ways that will improve safety and transportation efficiency over the next several years. However, different levels of vehicle connectivity and automation in the transportation network can significantly alter transportation efficiency metrics ranging from 45% improvement to 60% deterioration. Moreover, we anticipate that efficient transportation and travel cost reduction might alter human travel behavior causing rebound effects, e.g., by improving efficiency, travel cost is decreased; hence willingness-to-travel is increased. The latter would increase overall vehicle miles traveled, which in turn might negate the benefits in terms of energy and travel time. In this talk, I will present a game-theoretic framework that studies the travelers’ decision-making under two behavioral models: (a) rational choice theory, where decision-makers are considered to be selfish and seek to maximize only their own utility; and (b) prospect theory, where the decision-makers’ biases and subjectivity are considered when decisions are made. The proposed framework aims at distributing travel demand in a given transportation network resulting in a socially-efficient mobility system, i.e., one which (1) respects and satisfies the travelers’ preferences, hence travelers would be willing to accept; and (2) ensures alleviation of congestion. The framework embraces a mobility pricing mechanism to control travel demand leading to a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE). I will discuss the inefficiencies at a NE and provide a bound that remains small as the number of travelers increases. Finally, I will present a simple simulation study highlighting the framework’s attributes.

Andreas Malikopoulos  is a Professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Information and Decision Science Lab at Cornell University. Prior to these appointments, he was the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2017-2023) and the founding Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Center (2019-2023) at the University of Delaware (UD). Before he joined UD, he was the Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow (2010-2017) in the Energy & Transportation Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the Urban Dynamics Institute (2014-2017) at ORNL, and a Senior Researcher in General Motors Global Research & Development (2008-2010). He received a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests span several fields, including analysis, optimization, and control of cyber-physical systems; decentralized stochastic systems; stochastic scheduling and resource allocation; and learning in complex systems. Dr. Malikopoulos is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the 2007 Dare to Dream Opportunity Grant from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the 2007 University of Michigan Teaching Fellow, the 2010 Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship, the 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award, and the 2020 UD’s College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate at the 2010 German-American Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium and organize a session on transportation at the 2016 European-American FOE Symposium. He has also been selected as a 2012 Kavli Frontiers of Science Scholar by the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Malikopoulos has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems from 2017 through 2020. He is an Associate Editor of Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ASME, and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.

Faculty Host: Christos Cassandras
Student Host: Andres Chavez Armijos