September 18th, 2014: 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM, Ketter Hall room 140, University at Buffalo North Campus

Prof. Dr. Engr. Ansar-Ul-Haque Yasar, Transportation Research Institute (IMOB) Hasslet, Belgium.

Prof. Dr. Engr. Ansar-Ul-Haque Yasar, Transportation Research Institute (IMOB) Hasselt, Belgium

Empowering Citizens with Sustainable Transportation in the Cities of Today & Tomorrow

While some may argue that the added value of one research domain is more limited in terms of added economic value than the other, the contribution of transportation research towards the society as a whole is significant. According to several predictions, the transport sector will overtake industry as the largest energy user by 2020. Unfortunately, the sector has major negative economic, social and environmental side effects. The complexity of today’s policy decision making has motivated several international research teams to develop policy frameworks which are finally aimed at mitigating these negative externalities of transport.

In several international policy frameworks, conventional transport models have been used for the quantification of these externalities. When an operational model is required to provide quantitative predictions about human behavior, some kind of mathematical apparatus is adopted in models. In this talk, we will cover the research domain of activity-based models. In these models, using micro-simulation, full activity-travel patterns of people are predicted in a high resolution of time and space, offering a wealth of information for policy making. The models give us a behavioral insight at an unprecedented level and allow for many interesting interdisciplinary applications. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art in activity-based modeling and discuss the interesting developments in this field of research. In addition to applications in the domain of transportation research, I will focus on scientific interdisciplinary applications with several other scientific fields, such as emission and health impact calculations, traffic safety and future electric vehicle (market) projections. Also the talk will cover novel interesting trends in the research field such as the increasing availability of big data and the development of modern survey technology, which offers several opportunities for policy makers but also provides researchers with novel challenges and problems.