Source: Rack­ham Grad­u­ate School

The Rack­ham Pre­doc­tor­al Fel­low­ship is one of the most pres­ti­gious awards grant­ed by the Rack­ham Grad­u­ate School. Doc­tor­al can­di­dates who expect to grad­u­ate with­in six years since begin­ning their degrees are eli­gi­ble to apply, and the strength and qual­i­ty of their dis­ser­ta­tion abstract, pub­li­ca­tions and pre­sen­ta­tions, and rec­om­men­da­tions are all tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion when grant­i­ng this award.

Mojtaba’s research inves­ti­gates the impacts of con­nect­ed and auto­mat­ed vehi­cle (CAV) tech­nolo­gies on improv­ing three crit­i­cal com­po­nents of trans­porta­tion sys­tems. First, he exploits graph col­or­ing tech­niques to solve the long-last­ing ques­tion of devis­ing poly­no­mi­al-time algo­rithms for find­ing inter­sec­tion con­trols that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly opti­mize the through­put and delay in a CAV envi­ron­ment under longitudinal/lateral motion con­trol. Sec­ond, he exploits con­nec­tiv­i­ty to devel­op dynam­ic pric­ing and relo­ca­tion poli­cies for ride-sourc­ing sys­tems that reduce data depen­den­cy and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to the sys­tem sto­chas­tic­i­ty. Also, it expo­nen­tial­ly decreas­es demand loss prob­a­bil­i­ty com­pared to sta­t­ic poli­cies. Last­ly, he includes a poly­no­mi­al-time rout­ing sched­ule with a tight opti­mal­i­ty gap that min­i­mizes the ener­gy con­sump­tion of the truck fleet, stand­ing for 24% of total ener­gy con­sump­tion of the trans­porta­tion sec­tor, by con­sid­er­ing the truck pla­toon­ing strat­e­gy that decreas­es air drag force and fuel consumption.