Monica Menendez is, since January 2018, an Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University in Abu Dhabi; and a Global Network Associate Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering in New York University.
Between 2010 and 2017, Monica was the Director of the research group Traffic Engineering at ETH Zurich. Prior to that, she was a Management Consultant at Bain & Company. She joined Bain after receiving a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2006. During her studies there she received, among other awards, an NSF Fellowship and the Gordon F. Newell Award. In total, she is the recipient of more than 20 scholarships and awards from well-known and prestigious organizations, professional societies, and universities. Monica also holds a dual degree in Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering from the University of Miami, from where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2002.
She is an active reviewer for over 20 journals, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Transportation Research Part C and the International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology, as well as the Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics committee of the Transportation Research Board. Monica is the author of over 40 peer reviewed journal publications and over 100 conference proceedings and reports.
Research Briefs
On the design of an optimal flexible bus dispatching system with modular bus units: Using the three-dimensional macroscopic fundamental diagram
This research was led by Monica Menendez, Global Network professor of civil and urban engineering, and Joseph Chow, deputy director of the C2SMART University Transportation Center at NYU Tandon.
This project proposes a flexible bus dispatching system using automated modular vehicle technology, and considers multimodal interactions and congestion propagation dynamics.
This study proposes a novel flexible bus dispatching system in which a fleet of fully automated modular bus units, together with conventional buses, serves the passenger demand. These modular bus units can either operate individually or combined (forming larger modular buses with a higher passenger capacity). This provides enormous flexibility to manage the service frequencies and vehicle allocation, reducing thereby the operating cost and improving passenger mobility.
The investigators developed an optimization model to determine the optimal composition of modular bus units and the optimal service frequency at which the buses (both conventional and modular) should be dispatched across each bus line. They explicitly accounted for the dynamics of traffic congestion and complex interactions between the modes at the network level, based on a recently proposed three-dimensional macroscopic fundamental diagram (3D-MFD). To the best of Chow and Menendez' knowledge, this is the first application of the 3D-MFD and modular bus units for the frequency setting problem in the domain of bus operations.
Using this system of analysis, the researchers were able to show improved costs across the system by adjusting the number of combined modular bus units and their dispatching frequencies to changes in car and bus passenger demand. A comparison with the commonly used approach that considers only the bus system (neglecting the complex multimodal interactions and congestion propagation) reveals the value of the proposed modeling framework.
Authors
- Joseph Chow,
- Monica Menendez