07 - Updates on the project (May 2020): Training weeks, TRA Visions, COVID-19, and first journal article!
Hello guys,
Philippe, SMARTI-ESR9,
I wanted to update you on my progress as the past months have been crazy!
Firstly, I attended two SMARTI training
weeks in the past months. The training on Automated Transport Infrastructures
in Granada (Spain) in October 2019 and the training on Resilient Transport
Infrastructures in Melbourne (Australia) in February 2020. Of course, both were
amazing experiences! Summaries of both events are (or will be) available on SMARTI's website.
Secondly, I prepared an entry for the TRA
Visions 2020 Young Researcher Competition. This EU funded competition provides
an opportunity for BSc, MSc, and PhD candidates from all over Europe to compete
for a cash prize and more importantly to showcase their research at the Transport Research Arena, one of the biggest transport conference in Europe! To
participate students have to prepare a report, presentation, and poster about their research idea. The entries are then judged by a panel of experts. In November 2019, I submitted an entry that presented my project ResilRoad and ranked 8th in the road transport mode category, which is not bad
considering that there were 50+ entries in this category. The poster that I prepared is availble on my ResearchGate page.
Unfortunately, as you can imagine, the
conference scheduled for April 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic :(. Like most of the world
population, I am now in self-solation, keeping up the good work. I have to admit
that I’m very lucky compared to other PhD students as most of my work can be
done from a computer.
But in the middle of this difficult period,
I had great news! The first journal paper from my PhD work has been accepted
for publication. I was very excited when
I received the email as this publication is an important milestone towards the completion
of the project and PhD! This paper titled Using a random road graph model to understand road networks robustness to link failures is
available in open access. In a nutshell, this paper presents a rigorous analysis of the effect of different road-network
characteristics (including the structure of the network or the distribution of the
travel demand) on the network ability to function despite perturbations (such as road closures for pavement maintenance, police incidents, and bridge collapse etc). The understanding derived from this paper (and the other ones that
I’m writing ^^) should support transport practitioners and public authorities in
planning and managing road networks for greater resilience. This paper was developed during my secondment at the JRC.
That’s all for today guys, stay tuned!
Philippe, SMARTI-ESR9,