Center for Sustainable Mobility
About CSM
The goal of the Center for Sustainable Mobility is to establish a center that is recognized both nationally and internationally for its research in the area of sustainable transportation planning with emphasis on mobility, efficiency, environmental, and safety impacts of transportation infrastructure.
About the Director
Dr. Hesham Rakha is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Mobility. He has been involved in research in the areas of traffic flow theory, traffic control, traffic engineering, and traffic modeling since the early 1990s, including collaboration in the development of the INTEGRATION microscopic traffic simulation software. He has over 95 refereed scientific publications including 47 fully refereed journal publications. He has also managed research projects for the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the National Park Service (NPS), the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (Virginia DEQ), and private organizations, such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), TransCore, Battelle, Burgess and Niple, Parsons Brinkerhoff (PB), and Cambridge Systematics.
The Center is comprised of three Research Groups:
The Transportation Systems and Operations group conducts research in the area of traffic flow theory,
transportation control, transportation safety, and transportation planning.
The Energy and Environment group conducts research on energy and environmental issues as they relate to the transportation sector.
The Traffic Data Mining and Visualization group conducts research in the area of spatial databases, data mining, data warehousing, and geographic information systems as they relate to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).
Current Work
Empirical Studies on Traffic Flow in Inclement Weather
The goal of this federally sponsored project is to characterize the impact of inclement weather including: precipitation type, precipitation intensity, and visibility level of traffic flow behavior and key traffic stream parameters including free-flow speed, speed-at-capacity, capacity, and jam density.
Intelligent Parking Management Strategies
The proposed study utilizes the Virginia Tech campus to develop a prototype parking monitoring and management system that will manage, enforce and characterize on-campus parking facility utilization. Eventually, a system will be integrated within ATIS to display parking data in real-time to the general public in an attempt to reduce traffic congestion on campus.
Signal Prioritization
This project assesses the merits of signal prioritization for emergency and transit vehicles in the Washington, DC area.
More Current Research Examples:
- Developing a Fully Instrumented Test Facility
- Columbia Pike Field Evaluation - Phase II
Previous Work
Develop Analytical Procedures for Estimating Capacity of Weaving Sections
This research effort used the INTEGRATION software to estimate the capacity of freeway weaving sections.
ITS Approaches to Mitigating Truck Impacts on Traffic Stream Flow
The study investigated the feasibility of alternative ITS applications along the I-81 corridor and quantified the mobility, throughput, energy, environmental, and safety benefits of such ITS applications.
Addressing I-81 Transportation Issues
This project addressed the following issues concerning I-81: evaluating safety hazards in relation to other U.S. highways, evaluating the operation of truck weigh stations, and quantifying the impact of trucks on the surrounding traffic along various graded sections.
Addressing Urban Network Transportation Issues
The objective of this research effort was to develop traffic flow theory and control to address the unique issues of urban networks.
Traffic Modeling Issues
The objective of this research effort was to use GPS detection technology, together with fully-equipped vehicles, to characterize vehicle behavior in order to provide data that would allow for the enhancement of current state-of-the-art microscopic simulation tools.
VDOT Surveillance Needs
The objective of this project was to estimate dynamic roadway travel times using loop detector, video detection, and Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) technologies.
Intersection Collision Warning Field Study
The objective of this study, completed in the FHWA Highway Driving Simulator, was to partially replicate the simulator study to verify that drivers will respond to red-light violator warnings with sufficient speed and intensity to avoid a collision with the violator.