Kalafatas and Peeta Win Best Paper Award at the AATT 2008 Conference

May 30, 2008 - A paper co-authored by NEXTRANS Center Ph.D. student George Kalafatas and Director Srinivas Peeta won the best paper award at the 10th International Conference on Applications of Advanced Technologies in Transportation (AATT 2008) in Athens, Greece. It received the Best Paper Award in Traffic Engineering from among 800 papers from over 25 countries. 

The paper, titled "A direct bridge between dynamic traffic assignment and graph theory," proposed an innovative modeling approach for dynamic traffic systems and operations. The contributions are twofold. From an applications standpoint, dynamic traffic systems can be simulated with significantly reduced computational times. This is an important step towards real-time route guidance in congested traffic networks, as crucial estimates for the network status can be provided faster to drivers. From a theoretical standpoint, dynamic traffic systems are modeled with an exact graph theoretic representation. This enables the elegant illustration of the synergy between transportation engineering and graph theory.