Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy

Shared mobility services have shown that a continuum of solutions can be provided between the traditional individual transport and mass transit by making use of an underlying cyber-physical substrate that provides advanced, distributed, and networked computational and communication support. Shared mobility services, also known as microtransit services, provide a way of solving the last-mile connectivity problem, and can enable access to key service such as healthcare, jobs, and food for disadvantaged communities. Despite recent advances in optimizing energy efficiency in microtransit services, on-the-ground pilots have struggled to increase performance measures such as passenger miles per revenue mile or passengers per unit energy due to challenges in demand aggregation, understanding user needs, and human behavior. This talk proposes a framework for multi-passenger transport that allows dynamic routing and behavioral dynamics of passengers. The implications of disadvantaged communities and how their needs may be met by the proposed framework are discussed. A brief discussion of monetary incentives, risk-attitudes, and behavioral models is provided. The role of tools such as utility theory and prospect theory is also explored.

Biography:

Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy is Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mech. Eng. at MIT.  Her research interests span adaptive control theory and its applications to several engineering systems including to aerospace, automotive, propulsion, and energy systems, cyber-enabled energy grids, and urban mobility. She has received best paper awards (Axelby; CSM), Distinguished Member and Distinguished Lecturer awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), Best Paper award from IFAC for Annual Reviews in Control (2021-23), and a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF. She is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni award from Indian Institute of Science for 2021. Anu Annaswamy is the author of a graduate textbook on adaptive control and several journal and conference publications, and co-editor of two vision documents on smart grids, two editions of the Impact of Control Technology report, and the 2023 CSS report "Control for Societal-scale Challenges: Road Map 2030". She is also a coauthor of a 2021 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee report on the Future of Electric Power in the United States, and a 2023 NASEM report on the Role of Net-metering in the Evolving Electricity System. She served as the President of CSS in 2020. She is a Faculty Lead in the Electric Power Systems workstream in the MIT Future Energy Systems Center.