Park Receives Student Paper Award at 2015 TRF Annual Meeting

transportation

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. candidate Hyoshin Park was awarded second place in the Student Paper Award category at the 2015 Transportation Research Forum (TRF) Annual Meeting.

Advised by CEE Professor Ali Haghani, Park was recognized for his work on the Vehicle Probe Project sponsored by the I-95 Corridor Coalition and several state Departments of Transportation. His award-winning paper, "Optimal Number and Location of Bluetooth Sensors Considering Stochastic Travel Time Prediction," demonstrated a novel optimal number and location of Bluetooth sensors using stochastic and dynamic approaches.

"Determining the optimal number and location of sensors is essential to effectively manage traffic on highways," Park said. "Bluetooth technology has proven to be a cost-efficient speed data collection approach."

Even more, ease of shipping, handling and installation make relocation an option, he explained. The machine access control (MAC) address of a cell phone, camera, or other electronic devices is not linked to a specific person through any type of central database. Instead, the MAC address, which is unique for each Bluetooth device - and the time of the detection - are logged when the device is detected at a Bluetooth sensor.

In this study, existing fixed sensors are used to estimate travel time prediction errors at candidate locations where researchers deploy portable sensors, Park explained. "Potential sampling error of each candidate location is also counted in selecting optimal locations," he said. "A two-stage stochastic formulation considers uncertainty of traffic conditions based on scenarios generated by principal component analysis and clustering analysis to uncover the underlying spatial correlations and temporal patterns."

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Park holds bachelor's degrees in Physics and Urban Engineering and a master's degree in Transportation Engineering from Yonsei University.

Park received the award from the TRF Foundation during the Awards Luncheon held in Atlanta, Ga., on March 14, 2015. The award carries a $750 grant from the TRF Foundation.

Published April 1, 2015