Events Calendar

DANIEL J. EPSTEIN DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL & SYSTEMS ENGINEERING SEMINAR

Speaker: Dr. Luca Quadrifoglio, Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University

Talk Title: Paratransit System Design: Evaluating the Use of "Transfers" for Zoning Strategy

Abstract: Paratransit services often adopt decentralized zoning strategies to divide large service area into smaller zones. Paratransit services often adopt decentralized Zoning strategies to divide large service area into smaller zones assigned to different providers in order to simplify their management. If zones are independently managed, there is no coordination among providers. This causes the overall system to be quite inefficient, due to a large amount of empty trip miles driven, a major cause for these services' high operating costs. Coordination among providers is possible by including transfer points at zone boundaries and can potentially improve productivity. The zoning with transfer practice has been adopted by some transit agencies (Chicago, Boston and San Diego, for example) but never properly investigated from a research point of view. This research study evaluates the impact of transfer design on decentralized zoning paratransit through extensive simulation analyses.

Biography: Dr. Luca Quadrifoglio holds a Laurea in Chemical Engineering (1996) from the Politecnico of Milan (Italy), a M.S. in Engineering Management (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees from the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the USC. After a year as a Postdoc at CREATE (USC), he joined the Faculty of the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University in 2006. He published a number of papers in top rated Journals, won the 2006 Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award (3rd place) and the 2004 Council of University Transportation Center (CUTC) National Student Award for best publication in Science and Technology. His research interests are related to the broad field of Operations Research primarily applied to transportation systems, mainly transit.

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - Room 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum