Ketan Savla is an assistant professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California. Before joining USC, he was a research scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current one
research interests are in distributed control and estimation of dynamic networks, state-dependent queuing systems and distributed control of mobile agents.

Growth in travel demand is expected to outpace the rate of capacity expansion of our transportation infrastructure. That's why most of our transportation system is
is expected to operate at or near capacity for the foreseeable future and is therefore more vulnerable to disruptions. This, in combination with a higher penetration of smart technology, is
is expected to create serious dynamics among users and transport controllers at multiple scales. It is therefore imperative to develop methodologies for modeling and control
dynamic effects for both real-time and long-term planning purposes.

In this talk we present our results on the stability and robustness of dynamic urban transport networks. The dynamic models consist of mass conservation at the connections and flow conservation at the junctions. The routing of the flow on the nodes is a result
from a combination of route selection behavior of the driver and real-time control such as adaptive traffic light control. We present a new class of routing principles that use only local information for their implementation, and yet can be shown to be maximally stabilizing in the presence of small transient perturbations and maximally robust in the face of severe and persistent perturbations. We particularly emphasize the role of cascading effects in our analysis. Finally, we propose simple measures of the robustness of transport networks in terms of network structure, travel demand, route choice and capacity, which are relevant for planning purposes.

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