Welcome to ACTION Lab

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Welcome

Welcome to the ACTION Lab. We conduct exploratory research in urban traffic management, provide engineering service and offer product-grade traffic management solutions and software packages to transportation agencies as well as industrial partners. We also perform big data analytics and high-performance computing.

The topics include but are not limited to: advanced urban traffic control systems, including pioneering traffic signal systems modeling, design and prototype, traffic sensor design and prototype and urban traffic analytics. In addition, certain far-future research topics are within our research scope, such as intersection automation. Most of our research outputs reach the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 or higher. Hope you have a wonderful adventure on our research page.

Students are welcomed to join our research group. If you are interested in our research area, please contact us. For funded GTA/GRA positions, intensive programming is needed in our core research. At this time, applicants do not need to take GRE exams but they will be carefully evaluated by the program and potential advisors. Future students should at least be proficient in one programming language (e.g., C++, Python, PhP, Javascript, etc). Otherwise, please do not contact us since we cannot work together effectively. Financial aid may be availabe for quarlified students.

-- Dr. Pengfei Li (Taylor), Director of ACTION Lab

Last update October 10th 2023

news

Congratulations to Slade Wang and Swastik Khadka on their recipients of ITS Texas Students Scholarship Awards for their oustanding work in ITS. Slade got the first-place award and Swastik got the 4th place award, November, 2023

Congratulations to Swastik Khadka on his recipient of the Dwight David Eisenhower Transsortation Fellowship, a renowned national award for outstanding transportation students, September, 2023

Welcome Sijan Shrestha, a new Ph.D. student from Nepal, Aug-2023

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by the NITC UTC center at Portland State University to deploy their LiDAR solutions. The co-PI is Dr. Stephen Mattingly at UTA, May-2023

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by Texas DOT to explore using the Wejo data to identify driving behaviors on freeways. The collaborator is Dr. J Wu of Texas A&M Transportation Institute, April-2023

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by City of Arlington to explore cutting-edge AI technoloiges for traffic data collection from existing city cameras. An AI platform will be developed to meet such needs, Aug-2022

Farzana R. Chowdhury defended her dissertaton titled "A Sustainable and Equitable Transportation System Design Under Connected Vehicle and Big Data-Driven Environment". Dr. Chowdhury has accepted the job offer from WSP and become a professional traffic engineer, Aug-2022

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by Texas DOT to explore applying ATSPM into full-spectrum traffic signal design and planning and management for 2 years. The Co-PI is Dr. Stephen Mattingly, May-2022

Ph.D. candidate Farzana R. Chowdhury has one paper titled "Congestion-aware heterogeneous connected automated vehicles cooperative scheduling problems at intersections" published on Journal of Intelligent Transportation System: Technology, Planning, and Operations, congratuations, Nov-2021

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by Utah DOT to explore applying LIDAR sensors to collect pedestrians' behavioral data at intersections for 1.5 years. The collaborator is Dr. Terry Yang at Univesity of Utah, OCT-2021

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by North Central Texas Council of Govenments (NCTCOG) to explore applying connected vehicles to travel demand modeling in the DFW area, OCT-2021

Ph.D. Candidates Slade Wang and Farzana R. Chowdhury has two papers accepted for publicaion in the proceedings of flagship meeting of IEEE Intelligent Trans Systems Socieity on network flow and traffic control modeling. Congratulations, Sep-2021

Ph.D. Candidates Slade Wang and Farzana R. chowdhury gave 5 talks and posters on advanced traffic control modeling, traffic dynamics modeling and arterial traffic signal performance during ASCE's Transortation & Development Conferences, June-2021

Dr. Li was appointed as an editorial board member for an interdisciplinary journal: Discover Internet of Things (Springer), Jan-2021

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by USDOT UTC (CTEDD) to explore the commercial Internet-Connected Vehicle Data to improve Transportation Efficient, Safety and Equity. The Co-PI is Professor Qisheng Pan from Public affairs and Planning at UT Arlington. (Dec-2020)

Two undergraduates in ACTIONLAB were awarded a undergraduate research grant by the college of engineering at UTA. They will develop a smartphone app to explore novel freight signal priority systems under the supervision of Dr. Li. Congratualtions, Swastik and Nishma! (Oct-2020)

Dr. Li was nominated as (and accepted) a member of TRB standing committee: Traffic Simulation Committee (ACP 80). His term is from Aug-10-2020 to April-14-2023

Dr. Li was contracted with City of Frisco in Texas to assist the evaluation of its first adaptive traffic signal system based on the UTA-ATSPM system, a big-data-driven arterial traffic monitoring system developed by ACTIONLAB. The contract will be executed on Sep-01-2020 and last 12 months

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by USDOT UTC (NITC) to study a pedestrian behaviors and a pioneering pedestrian-adaptive traffic control mechanism based on LIDAR sensors at intersections. This project is collaborated with Portland State University and University of Utah. July-2020

Dr. Li was awarded a research grant by USDOT UTC (CTEDD) to study a novel Public-Private-Partnership Data Sharing Policy for Arterial Traffic Management. This project is collaborated with Georgia Insitute of Technology. March-2020

ACTIONLAB has a new applied research paper titled 'Actuated Traffic Signal Performance Evaluation Along Arterials Using Wi-Fi Travel Time Samples and High-resolution Traffic Signal Events Data' published in Transportation Research Record. March-2020

"ACTIONLAB has a new theortetical paper titled 'A Mixed Integer Programming formulation and scalable solution algorithms for traffic control coordination across multiple intersections based on vehicle space-time trajectories' published in transportation Research Part B: Methdological volume 134, April 2020, page 266-304. Congratulations, Slade!"

"ACTIONLAB has 4 papers recommended to present at TRB 2020 Annual Meeting, please check Publication Page for more details"

ACTIONLAB moves to University of Texas at Arlington in August 2019

MSU ITE student chapter won the "Traffic Bowl" in Deep South ITE winter conference 2019

"Institute of System Engineering Research (ISER) @ MSU generously offered a high-end GPU computing server for us to explore cutting-edge HPC techniques. Read more"

"ACTIONLAB has four new papers being recommended to present at TRB 2019 Annual Meeting, please check Publication Page for more details"

"Dr.Li was awarded a research project with a value $83,231 to develop HPC-enabled mega-scale simulation system for cross-domain multi-scale network analytics (2018~2019). This project is funded by Institute of System Engineering Research at MSU. Dr.Li will take 80% credit of this project."

Dr. Li was awarded a two-year (2018~2019) project by Mississippi DOT with a value of $198,064 to prototype and evaluate a new solution to arterial performance evaluation based on captured Wi-Fi MAC addresses. He will be the PI (80% credit) (Jan-2018)

Dr. Li, in collaboration with his colleague, was awarded a 18-month (2018~2019) project by Mississippi DOT with a value of $150,000 to evaluate the concept of arterial performance evaluation based on the so-called "high-resolution traffic signal events". He will be the Co-PI (30% credit) (Dec-2017)

Dr. Li published a theoretical paper titled "Dynamic programming-based multi-vehicle longitudinal trajectory optimization with simplified car following models" in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological as a co-author. (Dec-2017)

Dr. Li, in collaboration with his former colleague at ASU, published a theoretical paper titled "Recasting and optimizing intersection automation as a connected-and-automated-vehicle (CAV) scheduling problem: A sequential branch-and-bound search approach in phase-time-traffic hypernetwork" in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological (Nov-2017)

Two Ph.D students join the ACTION Group: Slade Wang from China Agirculultural University with the Mechatronics BS degree and Farzana Chowdhury from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology with Civil Engineering BS degree. Welcome! (08-2017)

Dr. Li receives a subcontract from Institute for Systems Engineering Research (ISER) at Mississippi State University on the "Brown Water Port Analytics" project in '17~'18. Dr. Li together with his students, will develop high-fidelity port simulation models as well as explore the potential of high-performance computing cluster (HPC) in the ISER's research. The featured high-performance computing collaboration (HPC^2) Center at Mississippi State University is a major research facility serving multiple institutes in the southeast US. (07-2017)

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