Events

Closing the Loop: Human Choice and Optimization in Urban Transportation

Civil, Urban, and Environmental Engineering
Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community
C2SMART seminar flyer: Closing the Loop: Human Choice and Optimization in Urban Transportation, Youngseo Kim, UCLA, Friday November 20, 2-3pm ET, C2SMART Lab and Zoom

Join C2SMART and the Department of Civil, Urban, and Environmental Engineering for a seminar by Dr. Youngseo Kim, Assistant Professor at UCLA. The seminar is hybrid: attend in person at the C2SMART Lab or join on Zoom (contact Lizzie Pohl for the link).

Traveler choices shape network flows, while network conditions and mobility service operations influence those choices. Capturing this interaction is essential for effective transportation planning and operations, yet integrating traveler behavior models into system-level optimization remains underexplored. Logit-based choice models are often embedded in optimization through nonlinear constraints or bilevel formulations, creating computational difficulties for both behavioral characterization and system design.

This talk presents the Primal-Dual Maximum-Utility Structured Estimator (PD-MUSE), a convex programming framework for representing and estimating logit-based discrete choice models. The convex structure enables computationally tractable characterization of traveler behavior, while duality allows behavioral parameters to be recovered from a single optimization solve. The framework provides a modular representation of traveler behavior that can be embedded in broader network optimization problems. By representing travel patterns as flows, it models behavioral responses at the network level and supports behavior-aware optimization when service levels and traveler choices are coupled. Dr. Kim will explore applications in travel demand modeling, transit operations, mobility-on-demand dispatching, vertiport location planning for air mobility, and curbside pricing.

The talk concludes with a research agenda for closing the loop through partnerships between public agencies and private mobility operators: sharing operational data, testing proposed policies in the field, and using observed traveler responses to inform subsequent planning and operations.

Speaker: Youngseo Kim, Assistant Professor, UCLA