Faculty researchers contribute to the ARISE project from a range of disciplines and universities in Kansas. To learn more about these researchers, University of Kansas Senior Makenna Dawson recently interviewed Husain Aziz, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Kansas State University. Here are edited exerpts from their conversation.
I would love to learn more about your research on the ARISE project. What is your role?
My role in ARISE focuses on investigating transportation infrastructure. Specifically, we study how to measure resilience and integrate equity. I focus on modeling transportation systems.
Interesting. Can you give an example of how you model transportation systems?
I’m not a vehicle engineer or a mechanical person. Rather, I focus on modeling the systems using network theories, pure micro simulation, and travel behavior concepts. These models can help tell us things like where people move, how they move, and different technologies. If you have self-driving vehicles, or if you have connected vehicles, or if you have smart signalized intersection, we want to know how that will improve our transportation system.
What are the key areas that you study for improving transportation systems?
I generally focus on three major areas. The first is safety. So, if you think about transportation, we just need to move people in a safe manner. The second one is access. If we say that the transportation system is actually for everyone, then if somebody does not have a car, do we have sufficient resources or capabilities that can accommodate the persons without cars in our system? So it goes back to understanding how we can accommodate all persons, regardless of their income status, socio economic status, and general capability of moving around. How do we do that? Basically, access and equity are interconnected. The last area we focus on is resilience.
What do you mean by resilience?
Consider this example. If you have a very terrible storm in Kansas City, and everything is closed. How do you make everything functional again? It’s a very broad area, but one of topics we are working on for this project is the post disaster routing to help decide which part of the community you need to reach first. Or another example could be that we are helping a utility company decide how to make repairs after a storm. They only have a certain number of trucks and can only send out so many at a time to restore power. Which communities do they serve first? Answering this question requires considering both efficiency and equity aspects.
What other factors do you investigate?
We also try to look at how to improve the infrastructure and make investments before storms hit, to limit impact and make recovery faster. We want to be able to do real time decisions in an emergency. When a storm hits, for example, how do we reroute people? Which roads will be closed? How do we manage the supply chain? We can also think about long term investment, like, how do we invest so that the roads are high enough to not be impacted by floods. We’re looking for how to leverage technology to make the roads safer, more accessible, more equitable, and more resilient.