Section: Application Domains

Smart transportation systems

The smart cities trend aims at optimizing all functions of future cities with the help of digital technologies. We focus on the segment of urban trains, which will evolve from static and scheduled offers to reactive and eventually on demand transportation offers. We address two challenges in this field. The first one concerns the optimal design of robust subway lines. The idea is to be able to evaluate, at design time, the performance of time tables and of different regulations policies. In particular, we focus on robustness issues: how small perturbations and incidents can be accomodated by the system, and how fast return to normality occurs, when does the system become unstable. The second challenge concerns the design of new robust regulation strategies to optimize delays, recovery times, and energy consumption at the scale of a full subway line. These problems involve large scale discrete event systems, with temporal and stochastic features, and translate into robustness assessment, stability analysis and joint numerical/combinatorial optimization problems on the trajectories of these systems.