USC Price School of Public Policy Professor Genevieve Giuliano is among a team of researchers at the METRANS Transportation Center to receive an $800,000 research award from the National Science Foundation.
Guiliano, along with METRANS Associate Director of Research Petros Ioannou and Associate Director of Special Programs Maged Dessouky, earned the award under the NSF Cyber-Physical Systems program titled, “Cyber Physical Regional Freight Transportation System.”
The purpose of the research is to use optimization and control techniques, together with real-time simulation models, to improve performance of complex networks. In particular, the METRANS group will focus on enhancing the freight transportation system.
The fundamental idea is to balance demand across routes, time periods and modes (rail and truck). This research will incorporate policy and institutional constraints directly into the optimization models. Ioannou, professor of electrical engineering systems and director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, will serve as principal investigator.
“[This grant] represents the best of what can happen when we foster and support multidisciplinary research,” noted Giuliano, co-principal investigator, who holds the Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government at USC Price. “Through our years working together in METRANS, we have learned a lot about our respective fields, and that has led to ideas about how we might pool our knowledge and perspective to address new problems.”
“This grant award is testimony that working across disciplines can pay off,” she added. “One of the great things about cross-school research centers is the environment they provide for these types of collaborations.”
Dessouky, co-principal investigator and professor at the USC Viterbi Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, finds this research particularly timely.
“Today’s logistics environment is very fragmented, resulting in a number of system-wide inefficiencies,” he said. “Taking a systems perspective and balancing the freight workload across mode and time has the potential to significantly reduce congestion and bottleneck points in the transportation network.” he notes. “A number of policy issues – e.g., what incentive structure must be created for participation – must be addressed by the research for the developed optimization and control algorithms to be applicable to the freight operating environment.”