Professor Shinya Kikuchi Inaugurates NEXTRANS Seminar Series

On April 1, 2008, Professor Shinya Kikuchi, the Charles E. Via Jr. Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, delivered the inaugural lecture of the NEXTRANS seminar series at Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering.  In a talk titled “Making Decision, Judgment, and Adjustment under Unclear Circumstances in Transportation Analysis,” he spoke to a standing room only crowd of students from the transportation engineering program and faculty from the Schools of Civil Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Computer Science Department.  Dr. Kikuchi spent time with students, faculty and staff after the presentation for a question and answer session. 

Transportation planning decisions take place usually in the setting of the vague multi-objective and multi-constraint environment. The objectives are usually expressed in natural language and the priorities among them are not defined clearly. Many constraints have some degree of flexibility. Decisions in this environment must be sensible to the desire of each stakeholder; and as such, the mathematical process should be faithful to the concerns of each stakeholder as much as possible. Professor Kikuchi began his presentation by discussing the issues of uncertainty in transportation analysis. He then proceeded to propose an optimization scheme (fuzzy optimization) that incorporates the concerns of the stakeholders in a conversational manner. The scheme is applied to the problems of resource allocation, parameter adjustment, and the multi-objective situation problem. The outcome of the scheme is interpreted in the context of possibility measure. Dr. Kikuchi concluded his talk with a general discussion about how to deal with uncertainty in transportation analysis.