EETAC talks - "Modelling traditional and advanced Transportation Systems", by Prof. Maria Nadia Postorino (Univ. of Bologna)

Speaker: Prof. Maria Nadia Postorino, Full professor of Transportation Engineering - PhD. Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna. Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering (DICAM)  

 

Date, time and location: Thursday 10th November, 12:00h, classroom 026V. 

 

Abstract: Transportation systems consist of physical and organizational elements that produce transportation opportunities, and the demand (travelers and goods) that use such opportunities to travel between origin-destination pairs. The intrinsic complexity of transportation systems comes from the interaction among many elements influencing each other both directly and indirectly, often nonlinearly, and with many feedback cycles. In addition, some elements can be defined as “technical” (e.g., vehicles, infrastructure), which are traditionally studied by engineering disciplines, while some others (e.g., number of travelers and goods) require using concepts traditionally used in social and economic sciences rather than in engineering. The mathematical theory of transportation systems is based on a system engineering approach together with a set of methods to make it operational – such as rules for defining a network model to models and techniques for estimating travel demand and algorithms for solving large-scale computational problems. The theoretical framework and related models, which are the subject of this seminar, can be used to plan and design both current transport systems and advanced, innovative transport systems.

 

Bio: Maria Nadia Postorino, PhD in Transportation, is full professor of Transportation Engineering at the University of Bologna. She has been involved in many international and national research projects and scientific committees. She has been invited researcher at the Collegium de Lyon-IEA, ENS - Université de Lyon (France), Visiting Professor at the School of Computing-University of Portsmouth (UK) and at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France). She is component of the Scientific Committee of the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (France) and of Naval Group (international naval company).