Levin Research Group

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on modeling connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and intelligent transportation systems to predict and optimize how these future technologies will affect travel demand and traffic flow. For instance, CAVs can form long platoons on freeways or admit reservation-based intersection controls that replace traffic signals. However, although CAVs may improve traffic efficiency, they could also increase travel demand by reducing the costs and disutility of travel, admitting empty repositioning trips, and reducing transit usage. CAV taxis could replace personal vehicle usage due to the low cost per ride of autonomous Uber systems. I use traffic flow, transportation network analysis, and operations research methods to study these new technologies and their effects on cities.

• May 2021: Rongsheng Chen successfully defended his PhD dissertation, Maximum-stability distributed control in traffic networks.
• April 2021: Jake Robbenolt won the Richard P. Braun Transportation Scholarship.
• April 2021: Jeffrey Hu completed his BS honors thesis, Max-pressure signal control with cyclical phase structure.
• January 2020: Rongsheng Chen and I won the 2019 Ryuichi Kitamura Award for our paper Dynamic user equilibrium of mobility-on-demand system with linear programming rebalancing strategy.
• October 2019: I received the IEEE ITSS Young Professionals Traveling Fellowship for travel to IEEE ITSC.