Two ERC Starting Grants for TI researchers
Two researchers within the Transport Institute have been awarded ERC Starting Grants. These grants worth 1,5 million Euros for a programme of 5 years are awarded by the European Research Council. They are meant to support researchers who are starting their career, but have delivered outstanding results with supervision. Within TI, both Oded Cats and Sergio Grammatico have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant.
Oded Cats – CriticalMaaS
The transportation market is changing. Online markets are causing a dynamic matching of supply of transport and the demand of passengers. As a result, the ownership model may change into a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) model. Current transport models are designed with the assumption that people travel in transport vehicles that are either fully managed and on a fixed schedule or individual vehicles with private ownership. MaaS breaks that conventional assumption, therefore existing models for travel behaviour and transportation networks cannot explain or predict the dynamics, interactions and changes of the market. Questions such as how will, possible fully automated, on-demand transport services act and what influence will these have on transport systems and social objectives will be answered in the research project named CriticalMaaS.
Oded Cats will develop and test transport network theories and models within the domain of the bilateral mobility market, concentrating on three aspects: behaviour, network and management and mass effects.
Sergio Grammatico – COSMOS
Modern society is based on large-scale, interconnected, complex infrastructures, e.g. power, transportation and communication systems, with network structure and interacting subsystems controlled by autonomous components and human users, generically called “agents”. These systems possess the features of “complex” systems of systems (C-SoS), such as rationality and autonomy of agents. Multi-agent optimization has attracted an extraordinary amount of research attention as a methodology to let agents cooperatively coordinate their actions, but it is inappropriate and ineffective for systems with noncooperative (selsh) agents, virtually all modern C-SoS. A paradigm shift is necessary to ensure safe and ecient operation of complex systems with possibly noncooperative agents. With this aim, COSMOS shall embrace dynamic game theory and pursue a twofold scientic and technical objective: 1) to conceive a unifying framework for the analysis and control of complex, multi-agent, mixed cooperative and noncooperative, systems; 2) to provide automated computational methods for solving coordination, decision and control problems in C-SoS.
COSMOS will develop the theoretical foundations and intelligent control methodologies for the next generation of complex and autonomous systems, with applications in automated driving and power grids.
