Long-term User and Community Impacts of High-speed Rail in the United States’Midwest Corridor

This study contributes new insights in the debate over the viability of high-speed rail(HSR)in the United States and the value proposition for government investment.The modeling focus of this study is two-fold,and the modeling approach makes a case for a fundamental shift from the current perspective of HSR viability.First,the user and community impact assessment of HSR is conducted in the same manner as traditional transportation system evaluation(i.e.,vehicle operating costs(VOC),travel time,safety,emissions,and energy consumption)to provide comparable conclusions regarding intercity transportation alternatives.Second,the model presented in this study analyzes both ridership and impacts within the same systematic framework to assess the long-term impacts on the individual transportation modes,total system metrics,and efficacy of alternate policies.Using this model,decision-makers can introduce various externalities to determine both the ideal and problematic conditions for the viability of a new HSR system.

Analyzing the Potential for Highspeed Rail as Part of the Multimodal Transportation System in the United States’Midwest Corridor

With increasing demand and rising fuel costs,both travel time and cost of current intercity passenger transportation modes are becoming increasingly relevant.Around the world,high-speed rail(HSR)is seen as a way to alleviate demand on highways and at airports.Ridership is the critical element in determining the viability of a large capital,long-term transportation investment.This paper provides a systematic,consistent methodology for analyzing systemwide modal ridership with and without a proposed HSR network and analyzes the potential for high-speed rail as part of the existing multimodal transportation system in a region in terms of ridership.Considerations of capital investment(e.g.,network design and HSR speed),along with exogenous demographic,technological,economic,and policy trends in the long-term,are used to project ridership over time.This study represents an important step toward a consistent,comprehensive economic analysis of HSR in the United States.

Platoon control of connected vehicles with heterogeneous model structuresconsidering external disturbances

This article studies the distributed cooperative control problem with the heterogeneous model structures and external disturbances for the connected vehicle(CV)platoon.We propose a hierarchical framework to separate information flow topology from local dynamics control,which aims to deal with the heterogeneous model structures of CV platoon.This hierarchical framework splits the control scheme into two layers,which include an observer in the upper-level layer and an integral sliding mode(ISM)controller in the lower-level layer.Then,the conditions for the asymptotic stability of the CV platoon are derived and the effectiveness of the ISM controller is demonstrated through the Lyapunov method.The research shows that compared with the traditional methods,the hierarchical framework does not need to specify the topology structure as a commonly used topology.Finally,numerical simulation results are performed to test the effectiveness and superiority of the developed controller.