Monica Menendez is a Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), as well as a Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering in New York University (NYU). She is also the Director and Lead PI of the NYUAD Research Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES); and the recipient of the NYUAD Distinguished Research Award for 2021. Before joining NYUAD in 2018, Prof. Menendez was the Director of the research group Traffic Engineering at ETH Zurich. She holds a Ph.D. (2006) and a M.Sc. (2003) in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley, and a dual degree in Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering (2002) from the University of Miami.
Her research interests include multimodal transportation systems, paying special attention to new technologies and information sources. Prof. Menendez is a member of multiple editorial boards for top journals in Transportation, and a number of international organizations, including the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT), and the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists (MBRAS). She is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications and over 200 conference contributions, book chapters, editorials, and technical reports.
Research News
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.