ASSOCIATE RESEARCH ENGINEER
Biography
Alex Kurzhanskiy received his M.S in Applied Mathematics & Computer Science from Lomonosov Moscow University and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Berkeley. He joined PATH as a Postdoctoral Researcher in 2008 and in 2011 he became a part of PATH research staff.
Presently, Dr. Kurzhanskiy is co-leading projects “Augmenting Connected Vehicle’s Awareness with I2V Information at Intersections” under Berkeley Deep Drive program and “Safe Operation of Automated Vehicles at Intersections” sponsored by Caltrans. He also manages 4-year NSF project “Traffic Operating System for Smart Cities” with transfer to practice.
In 2015-16 Dr. Kurzhanskiy conducted Caltrans projects “Modeling and Control of High Occupancy or Tolled (HOT) Lanes”, “HOT Lane Simulation Tools” and “Sustainable Operation of Arterial Networks”. The focus of these projects were: (1) measurement data analysis; (2) model development and identification of its parameters; and (3) simulation and evaluation of performance measures.
In 2013-14 Dr. Kurzhanskiy was a technical lead from UC Berkeley side of the pilot Interstate 680 Corridor System Management Plan project conducted by Connected Corridors for Caltrans District 4, which aimed at trying out novel approaches of traffic modeling and simulation for operations planning. He was responsible for developing calibration and simulation model quality evaluation tools for operations planning.
In 2012-14 Dr. Kurzhanskiy had actively contributed to various parts of the Connected Corridors program. He educated the team of software developers about the traffic engineering problems the program is solving and made significant impact on the software system design. Participating in research meetings and working with graduate students individually, he provides valuable guidance and mentorship to junior researchers.
Dr. Kurzhanskiy is the author of Aurora Road Network Modeler (RNM) © http://code.google.com/p/aurorarnm – a set of tools for operational planning and management of travel corridors (road networks comprised of freeways and surrounding urban arterials) and analysis of their performance. It is based on the Aurora object-oriented framework for simulation and analysis of flow networks and is implemented in Java. Aurora RNM has been used by transportation researchers in over twenty countries around the world. Since 2010, Aurora RNM was taught in the graduate course “Traffic Operations” in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley (CEE 255).
Dr. Kurzhanskiy is the author of CTMSIM © http://ucb-trans.org/topl/software.html – interactive freeway traffic macro-simulator for MATLAB. CTMSIM has proved to be a handy tool for transportation researchers who can use it for evaluating ramp metering algorithms and for estimating the impact of different response times in the incident management.
RESEARCH INTERESTS AND EXPERTISE
- Transportation: Traffic Engineering, Traffic Modeling & Simulation, Traffic Signal Control, GIS, Traffic Data Collection & Processing
- Dynamical Systems: Automatic Control Theory and Applications, Stochastic Processes
- Partial Differential Equations: Numerical Methods, Inverse Problems
- Cyber-Physical Systems: Dynamic Modeling & Simulation, Identification, State Estimation & Control
- Data Science: Time Series Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Convex Optimization, Compressed Sensing
- Information Technology: Distributed Computation, Parallelization, MapReduce, CUDA and GPU computing
Publications
Journal Papers
On Node Models for High-Dimensional Road Networks
M. Wright, G. Gomes, R. Horowitz, A.A. Kurzhanskiy. Transportation Research, Part B. 105C, pp. 212-234. Online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01054. 2017
Traffic Management: An Outlook
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Economics of Transportation Special Issue: Transportation Science. 4(3), pp. 135-146. 2015
Modeling Toll Lanes and Dynamic Pricing Control
E. Dorogush and A.A. Kurzhanskiy. International Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 54(3), pp. 440-457. Online: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00506. 2014
Guaranteed Prediction and Estimation of the State of a Road Network
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Transportation Research, Part C, 21(1), pp. 163-180. 2012
Reach Set Computation and Control Synthesis for Discrete-Time Dynamical Systems with Disturbances
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Automatica, 47(7), pp. 1414-1426. 2011
Theory and Computational Techniques for Analysis of Discrete-Time Control Systems with Disturbances
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Optimization Methods & Software, 26(4-5), pp. 719-746. 2011
Active Traffic Management on Road Networks: A Macroscopic Approach
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society A, 368, pp. 4607-4626. 2010
Behavior of the Cell Transmission Model and Effectiveness of Ramp Metering
G. Gomes, R. Horowitz, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, P. Varaiya, and J. Kwon. Transportation Research C, 16(4), pp. 485-513. 2008
Ellipsoidal Techniques for Reachability Analysis of Discrete-Time Linear Systems
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 52(1), pp. 26-38. 2007
Conference Papers
Control Experiments for A Network of Signalized Intersections Using the ‘.Q’ Simulator
J.Lioris, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, D. Triantafyllos and P. Varaiya. Presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems, Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France. 2014
Using Aurora Road Network Modeler for Active Traffic Management
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. American Control Conference, Baltimore. Invited paper. 2010
Aurora RNM – A Macroscopic Simulation Tool for Arterial Traffic Modeling and Control
A.H.F. Chow, G. Gomes, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, and P. Varaiya. 89th Annual TRB Meeting. 2010
Set-Valued Estimation of Freeway Traffic Density
A.A. Kurzhanskiy. 12th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems, Redondo Beach. 2009
Aurora Road Network Modeler
A.A. Kurzhanskiy, J. Kwon, and P. Varaiya. 12th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems. 2009
Aurora Arterial Modeler- A Macroscopic Tool for Urban Traffic Control
A.H.F. Chow, G. Gomes, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, and P. Varaiya. 12th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems. 2009
Congestion in ACTM Model
G. Gomes, R. Horowitz, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, P. Varaiya, and J. Kwon. European Control Conference, Koss, Greece. 2007
Ellipsoidal Toolbox (ET)
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, San Diego. 2006
Book Chapters
R.K. Shyamasundar and M.A. Pai, Editors. Oxford University Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Bhabha-Computer-Revolution-Edited-Shyamasundar/dp/0198072465 2011
Computation of Reach Sets for Dynamical Systems
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Chapter 29 of Control Handbook, 2nd Edition.
W.S. Levine, Editor. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Handbook-Second-Electrical-Engineering/dp/1420073664/ 2010
Technical Reports and Working Papers
Online Traffic Simulation Service for Highway Incident Management
A.A. Kurzhanskiy. Final report: SHRP 2 Reliability IDEA Project L15C. Online: http://www.trb.org/main/blurbs/168802.aspx 2013
Strategic Placement of Loop Detectors for Improving the Efficiency of Ramp Metering
K. Chung, G. Gomes, S.H. Park, A.A. Kurzhanskiy, and S.-Y. Kho. Working paper. 2010
Macroscopic Modeling of Multiple Vehicle Types and Freeways with HOV Lanes
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and A. Muralidharan. Working paper. Online: : http://ucb-trans.org/topl/papers/2009_KurzhanskiyMuralidharan__ModelingHOV.pdf2009
Aurora – Object-Oriented Framework for Simulation and Analysis of Flow Networks
A.A. Kurzhanskiy, J. Kwon, and P. Varaiya. Working paper. Online: : http://ucb-trans.org/topl/papers/2008_AuroraFramework.pdf 2008
CTMSIM – An Interactive Macroscopic Traffic Simulator for MATLAB
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Working paper. Online: http://ucb-trans.org/topl/papers/2008_KurzhanskiyVaraiya__CTMSIM.pdf
Ellipsoidal Toolbox
A.A. Kurzhanskiy and P. Varaiya. Technical Report 2006-46, EECS, UC Berkeley. 2006