Research Group

      

 Urban Transport Research Center, Central South University 

 

Introduction

Central South University (CSU, Changsha, Hunan Province of China) is a national key university (211 & 985 projects) directly administrated by the Ministry of Education of China. The School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering (STTE) of CSU has a national key first-level discipline—Traffic and Transportation Engineering, a postdoctoral exchange centre, a Yangtze-River scholar innovation team, a MOE key laboratory, and a Specialized Construction Point of National Characteristics — Traffic and Transportation.

Urban Transportation Research Center (UTRC) was founded in 2011. By developing innovative theories and key technologies in the field of transportation planning and management, we envision establishing a China-based and international renowned center, which provides theoretical and technological support toward improvements of operational efficiency, traffic safety and environment of urban transportation.

The research team consists of seven professors, four associate professors and several young lecturers, including a second-grade professor and two “Shenghua Scholar” professors. All the team members possess Ph.D. degree from oversea universities or have more than one year oversea research experiences. In the last five years, the staffs in UTRC have accomplished a number of high-level research projects, including 13 projects funded by Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Natural Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC), an international cooperation project funded by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, and over 10 projects at the provincial or ministerial level. The staffs in UTRC have published more than 90 SCI-indexed papers and 100 EI -indexed papers.

UTRC has a well-established laboratory platform, consisting of real-time traffic monitoring systems, speed measuring systems, passenger counting and analyzing systems, as well as transportation software such as PTV Vissim & Visum, EMME, AIMSUN, and TransCAD.

 

Research Fields

1．Urban traffic data fusion and information security: Multi-source heterogeneous traffic big data information fusion and information security, Public information platform for intelligent traffic management and control, Big data platform for collaborative operation of multi-modal public transport, Big data platform for traffic safety planning, management and control;

2. Urban traffic system organization optimization and intelligent management & control: Traffic flow evolution mechanism and state evaluation of traffic network, Optimization methods of urban traffic network, Intelligent traffic control and guidance technologies;

3．Urban public transport operation and management: Urban intelligent public transport operation and management technologies under big data environment, Design theory and method of train operation plan in urban rail transit system;

4. Pro-active prevention and control technologies for road traffic safety: Traffic safety planning technologies, Real-time active traffic safety management and control technologies, Safety situation monitoring, impact assessment and emergency safeguard technologies for the road infrastructures.

 

Research Features

Focusing on the large urban transport systems, our research aims to achieve the efficiency, safety and environment guided smart urban traffic management by comprehensive investigation of the systems’ supply and demand relationship, effective integration of road traffic and rail traffic, and efficient deployment of the technical methods of information and intelligent management. The research features could be summarized as the following four combinations: combination of long-term traffic management policies with specific traffic organization; combination of conventional traffic organization and intelligent management; combination of traditional transportation planning and traffic safety management; combination of road public transport and urban rail transit.

 

Engineering Applications

Comprehensive urban transportation planning and dedicated planning for specific fields such as road network planning, public transportation planning and parking planning; design of characteristic traffic organizations such as one-way traffic, traffic rationing and bus priority; traffic impact assessment; road traffic safety engineering; liability determination of road crash; intelligent highway safety management and control; traffic channelization and signal control; operation schemes of urban rail transit.