Best PhD Dissertation Award for Anahita Jamshidnejad

Anahita Jamshidnejad, who performed her PhD research at the department DCSC (Delft Center for Systems and Control), has won the 1st Prize in the 2018 IEEE ITSS Best PhD Dissertation Award competition for her PhD thesis "Efficient predictive model-based and fuzzy control for green urban mobility", for which she graduated in June 2017, cum laude.

The IEEE ITSS Best Dissertation Award is given annually by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) of IEEE for the best dissertation in any Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) area that is innovative and relevant to practice. The 1st Prize award consists of a plaque and a cash award of USD 2000.

Currently, Anahita Jamshidnejad is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control of ETH Zürich.

Summary thesis
The thesis developed efficient model-predictive control (MPC) and model-based fuzzy control methods, as well as accurate and fast modeling and estimation approaches for urban traffic networks. The thesis includes three main contributions:

(1) Accurate microscopic approaches are developed for estimating the macroscopic traffic variables, i.e., temporal-spatial flow, density, and average speed.

(2) Efficient approaches are proposed for solving the optimization problem of the nonlinear MPC-based controller for urban traffic networks.

(3) A novel adaptive and predictive model-based type-2 fuzzy control scheme is developed that can be implemented within a multi-agent control architecture.