UC San Diego Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Miroslav Krstic Receives ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal

Photo: Krstic (r) with Peter Meckl,
Chair of ASME Dynamic Systems & Control Division. 

UC San Diego mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Miroslav Krstic received the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal for lifetime achievements in automatic control at 10th ASME Dynamic Systems& Control Conference in Washington, DC in October 2017. 

Krstic’s acceptance lecture was on control of congested traffic (abstract at end of blog post).

Krstic serves as Sr. Assoc. Vice Chancellor for Research at UC San Diego. He is Director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics and holds the Daniel L. Alspach Endowed Chair in Dynamic Systems and Control.

Krstic is the mechanical and aerospace engineering department’s second recipient of the Oldenburger Medal, following Professor Bob Bitmead in 2014.

The Rufus Oldenburger Medal is a prestigious Society award for lifetime achievements in automatic control. Inaugurated in 1968, the medal recognizes significant contributions and outstanding achievements in the field of automatic control. Such achievements may be, for example, in the areas of education, research, development, innovation, and service to the field and profession. The award was established to honor Rufus Oldenburger for his distinctive achievements in the field and for his service to the Society and the Division. The list of recipients is a true honor role of major contributors to the science and profession of control. 

Abstract: Control of freeway traffic using ramp metering is a “boundary control” problem when modeling is approached using widely adopted coupled hyperbolic PDE models of the Aw-Rascle-Zhang type, which include the velocity and density states, and which incorporate a model of driver reaction time. Unlike the “free traffic” regime, in which ramp metering can affect only the dynamics downstream of the ramp, in the “congested traffic” regime ramp metering can be used to suppress stop-and-go oscillations both downstream and upstream of the ramp - though not both simultaneously. Controlling the traffic upstream of a ramp is harder - and more interesting - because, unlike in free traffic, the control input doesn’t propagate at the speed of the vehicles but at a slower speed, which depends on a weighted difference between the vehicle speed and the traffic density. I will show how PDE backstepping controllers, which have been effective recently in oil drilling and production applications (similarly modeled by coupled hyperbolic PDEs), can help stabilize traffic, even in the absence of distributed measurements of vehicle speed and density, and when driver reaction times are unknown.