The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) - NJIT Student Chapter organized the Transportation Seminar on October 14, 2002. It was the first seminar in the school year of 2002/2003. This time we decided to ask our fellow students who have published or presented their work in recognized journals or on transportation conferences, to give us a presentation of their work. It was a good opportunity for other students to see what kind of research is currently underway at the Transportation Center at NJIT, what are the results of presented studies, and also to see how the work should be presented to public. Foe presenters this was a chance to exercise their presentation skills and to survey attendees about the quality of their presentations.

First presentation was given by Mr. Branislav Dimitrijevic, graduate student at the Transportation Program, NJIT. He presented the study “Optimization of Bus Route Planning in Urban Commuter Networks”. The authors of the study are Mr. Branislav Dimitrijevic, Dr. Steven Chien, and Dr. Lazar Spasovic. Dr. Chien and Dr. Spasovic are professors at NJIT and are affiliated with graduate Transportation Program. Mr. Dimitrijevic said that this study has been presented at the Annual Meeting of TRB, in January 2001, and paper presenting the model and findings is expected to be published in Journal of Public Transit. Bus routing is one of the most important elements of public transit system planning. This study presents a model for optimizing service headway and a bus route serving an area with a commuter (many-to-one) travel pattern. The bus route is optimized by minimizing the total system cost, including the operator and the user costs, while considering diagonal links in study network. A method for transforming this network into a pure grid is developed which enables pure grid network models applicable to irregular grid networks. A case is given to demonstrate the application of the model. Results show that the optimal bus route is sensitive to demand distribution over the service area. Developed model is particularly useful for planning a new and evaluating an existing bus service in many cities embedded with general grid networks.

After this presentation, Mr. Xiaobo Liu, PhD candidate at Transportation Program presented a study "Predicting Travel Times for the South Jersey Real-Time Motorist Information System".  The authors include Dr. Chien (NJIT), Dr. Ozbay (Rutgers University) and Mr. Xiaobo Liu. The study has been presented at SCI 2002 conference and will be presented at the Annual Meeting of TRB in January 2003. This study develops a dynamic travel time prediction model for the South Jersey Motorist Real-time Information System. In order to develop a sound predictive system for travel times, the integration of traffic flow theory, traffic simulation, measurement and application of collected data are considered. Reliable prediction results can thus be generated with limited traffic data. So this study is based on a project that was done for NJDOT and thus has great application scope for the real-world Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which can alleviate the congestion and improve the overall transportation system efficiency.

After the presentations authors were asked by several attendees to answer some specific questions about their studies.