Carolina Osorio is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and in the Operations Research Center (ORC) at MIT. Her work develops operations research techniques to inform the design and operations of urban transportation systems. It focuses on simulation-based optimization algorithms for, and analytical probabilistic modeling of, congested urban road networks. She is the recipient of a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, an MIT Technology Review EmTech Colombia TR35 Award, a European Association of Operational Research Societies (EURO) Doctoral Dissertation Award, and has been recently honored as an invited speaker to the National Academy of Engineering's EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
In this talk we present a family of optimization methods that enable the use of high-resolution stochastic traffic simulators for optimization. These methods are known as simulation-based optimization algorithms. We present algorithms for large-scale dynamic problems, as well as ongoing work for real-time problems. We use these algorithms to address urban traffic management, as well as calibration, problems, and present the results of collaborations with various transportation agencies. We discuss recent results on the design of urban traffic management algorithms that account for the presence of (semi-)autonomous vehicles.