Dr. David Eckhoff

I am a Principal Scientist and the Director of the MoVES Lab at TUMCREATE, Singapore. My research focuses on future transportation technologies, simulation, the smart city, and privacy.

News

Publication Update 2021

26th August 2021

tumcreateThe second funding phase of TUMCREATE is ending and we are finalizing our journal articles and conference papers covering our work in recent months. Physical conferences are still rare and many journals have extremely long turn-around times, too long to wrap everything up in time. We are therefore focusing on short turn-around, open access, high impact journals such as IEEE Access. As of now, we have published three articles in IEEE Access, one article in Springer Autnomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The papers cover privacy-preserving and utility-aware data publication, a state-machine-based modelling framework for platooning maneuvers, as well as an article on bus bridging services. The Springer paper presents AVDM, a system architecture to model autonomous vehicles in microscopic simulations. We have some more papers in the making and we are hoping to publish later this year.

Related Publications
Thomas Braud, Jordan Ivanchev, Corvin Deboeser, Alois Knoll, David Eckhoff and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, "AVDM: A hierarchical command-and-control system architecture for cooperative autonomous vehicles in highways scenario using microscopic simulations," Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, vol. 35, April 2021. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Bhawani. S. Bhati, Jordan Ivanchev, Iva Bojic, Anwitaman Datta and David Eckhoff, "Utility-Driven k-Anonymization of Public Transport User Data," IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 23608-23623, January 2021. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Jordan Ivanchev, Corvin Deboeser, Thomas Braud, Alois Knoll, David Eckhoff and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, "A Hierarchical State-Machine-Based Framework for Platoon Manoeuvre Descriptions," IEEE Access, August 2021. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Iva Bojic, Chunling Luo, Xinrong Li, Daniel Zehe, David Eckhoff and Carlo Ratti, "Optimal Railway Disruption Bridging using Heterogeneous Bus Fleets," IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 2169-3536, June 2021. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]

Huawei and TUMCREATE set up New Joint Innovation Lab in Singapore to Boost Mobility Simulation Research

23rd April 2021

MOVES LabI am very happy to announce that we are entering a new partnership with Huawei to set up the MoVES (Mobility in Virtual Environments at Scale) laboratory at TUMCREATE in Singapore. I will act as the Director of the lab and together with my team we will conduct cutting-edge research that will enhance transport system simulation, facilitating and improving urban planning in smart cities. We will be extending and maturing the City Mobility Simulator (CityMoS). CityMoS is a high-performance mobility simulator that can simulate hundreds of thousands of entities (e.g., private vehicles, taxis, trains, public transport passengers) in parallel to offer a holistic evaluation approach for the transport systems of entire cities in great detail. The simulator can be used to predict traffic situations, support the building and configuration of transport infrastructure, and answer a wide range of what-if questions in the mobility domain.

Related Links
Press Release on TUMCREATE Website

Best Paper at Winter Simulation Conference 2020

20th January 2021

bestpaper_wscTogether with my colleagues Wenjun Tan, Yadong Xu, Philipp Andelfinger, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll we won the Best Contributed Application Paper Award at the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2020) conference. WSC recognizes contributed papers of exceptionally high quality and implements a stringent process in selecting the winners. Out of 200 accepted contributed papers, four finalists were selected by the track committee. Among the four finalists, the winner was eventually selected by an independent panel of three distinguished members of the simulation community. This academic achievement is a high recognition for the research work by the authors in the simulation field. The paper discusses how in a simulation (e.g., traffic), agents (e.g., vehicles) are advanced in time such that the reproducibility and scalability of the simulation can be supported. This is a critical aspect to address in high-performance simulations where hundreds of thousands of agents are simulated in parallel. The research has already been incorporated into TUMCREATE’s city-scale simulator CityMoS, which is being deployed in various research, government, and industry projects.

Related Links
News article on TUMCREATE Website

Related Publications
Wen Jun Tan, Philipp Andelfinger, Yadong Xu, Wentong Cai, Alois Knoll and David Eckhoff, "Multi-Thread State Update Schemes for Microscopic Traffic Simulation," Proceedings of Proceedings of the 2020 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), Virtual Conference, December 2020. Won Best Contributed Applied Paper Award [bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]

Publication Summary 2020

2nd December 2020

tumcreateAffected by the global pandemic, the publication cycle was not really the same this year. Conferences were held mostly virtually (or not held at all) as travel was impossible. Nonetheless, we were able to publish some interesting papers this year. Together with Jiajian Xiao we published a journal article in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience on automatic code generation for agent-based simulation. With my previous colleague at the University of Erlangen, Prof Marco Pruckner, we published a position paper about autonomous vehicle fleets at the ISGT-Europe conference. We had two entries at this year's PADS conference, one about traffic simulation on FPGAs, another one on the fast-forwarding of vehicle clusters. We managed to publish a paper on the general principle of simulation forwarding in the renowned ACM Tomacs journal and another paper in the Journal of Computational Science on how passengers can be simulated in confined spaces. As the year ends, we will be presenting two more papers at the Winter Simulation Conference. Additionally, we had one entry at Springer ICCS about autonomous vehicles acting as local traffic optimisers.

Related Publications
Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "Fast-Forwarding of Vehicle Clusters in Microscopic Traffic Simulations," Proceedings of 20th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Miami, FL, USA, June 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Philipp Andelfinger, Yadong Xu, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "Fidelity and Performance of State Fast-Forwarding in Microscopic Traffic Simulations," ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), vol. 30 (2), pp. 10:1-10:16, April 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Ashna Bhatia, Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff and Alois Knoll, "Autonomous Vehicles as Local Traffic Optimizers," Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Marco Pruckner and David Eckhoff, "Shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles and the Power Grid: Applications and Research Challenges," Proceedings of IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe (ISGT-Europe), The Hague, Netherlands, October 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Jiajian Xiao, K\il\inç Görkem, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "Pedal to the Bare Metal: Road Traffic Simulation on FPGAs Using High-Level Synthesis," Proceedings of 20th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Miami, FL, USA, June 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Jiajian Xiao, Philipp Andelfinger, Wentong Cai, Paul Richmond, Alois Knoll and David Eckhoff, "OpenABLext: An Automatic Code Generation Framework for Agent-Based Simulations on CPU-GPU-FPGA Heterogeneous Platforms," Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, June 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]
Boyi Su, Philipp Andelfinger, Jaeyoung Kwak, David Eckhoff, Henriette Cornet, Goran Marinkovic, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "A passenger model for simulating boarding and alighting in spatially confined transportation scenarios," Journal of Computational Science, vol. 45, 2020. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, Details]

Accepted Research Proposal

1st December 2020

citymosToday marks the start of an exciting research project that we managed to acquire in Germany. Together with industry partners Siemens and DHL as well as academic partners TH Dortmund, we will be using CityMoS to study the electrification of logistics fleets. The project will be located at TUM in Munich at the chair of Prof Knoll. I will act as the project lead from Singapore and give advice to our PhD students in Munich. This large project has the potential to really have an impact and I am excited it got accepted and that it is now finally starting.

CityMoS for Singapore

1st December 2020

citymosTogether with our colleagues from A*STAR, we were commissioned to support the Singapore government in their efforts to introduce electric vehicles. We will be using CityMoS to study private vehicles, buses, taxis and much more. This will then be combined with the FLEDGE simulator, developed by our colleagues in the ESTL group of TUMCREATE. This is very exciting news for us since we can now finally see our research being applied to the Singapore context.

Interview for TUMCREATE Website

29th May 2020

davidI was asked to do an interview for the TUMCREATE website for our "People Behind the Science" series. The full interview is available online (see link below). In the interview I talk about why I moved to Singapore and what inspires and challenges me in my research.

Related Links
Full Interview on tum-create website

Publication Update Second Half 2019

1st January 2020

tumcreateThe second half of 2019 was rather active in terms of publications, which is to be expected as the majority of conferences take place around October. Together with Prof Christoph Sommer and several co-contributors, we published an interesting book chapter on our widely-used Veins simulator in the Springer Book Recent Advances in Network Simulation. With one of the PhD-students I supervise, we published an article on how agent-based simulation code can be automatically generated for heterogeneous hardware. We presented one paper at the ITS World Congress on the need for novel simulation tools for mixed traffic scenarios and later in 2019, we followed that up with two publications at ITSC, showing how traffic simulations cane calibrated in a multi-objective manner and how the acceleration of autonomous vehicles can be optimized in mixed traffic.

Related Publications
Edgar Tamayo, Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Alois Knoll, "Multi-objective Calibration of Microscopic Traffic Simulation for Highway Traffic Safety," Proceedings of 22nd Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, October 2019. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff and Alois Knoll, "System-level Optimization of Longitudinal Acceleration Control of Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic," Proceedings of 22nd Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, October 2019. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Jordan Ivanchev, Thomas Braud, David Eckhoff, Daniel Zehe, Alois Knoll and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, "On the Need for Novel Tools and Models for Mixed Traffic Analysis," Proceedings of 26th ITS World Congress, Singapore, Singapore, October 2019. [bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Jiajian Xiao, Philipp Andelfinger, Wentong Cai, Paul Richmond, Alois Knoll and David Eckhoff, "Advancing Automatic Code Generation for Agent-Based Simulations on Heterogeneous Hardware," Proceedings of International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms (HeteroPar), Goettingen, Germany, August 2019. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]
Christoph Sommer, David Eckhoff, Alexander Brummer, Dominik S. Buse, Florian Hagenauer, Stefan Joerer and Michele Segata, "Veins -- the open source vehicular network simulation framework," in Recent Advances in Network Simulation, Antonio Virdis and Michael Kirsche (Eds.), Springer, 2019. [doi DOI, bib BibTeX, pdf PDF and Details]

ITS World Congress 2019

25 October 2019

ITSWCTUMCREATE presented their research at the ITS World Congress 2019 in Singapore. We demonstrated our simulation tools (CityMoS and BEHAVE) to a broad audience and also welcomed over 180 interested conference attendees to the CREATE tower to showcase our research in more detail. It was interesting interacting with visitors at the conference and also to see what the industry is currently working on and developing.

Visit from German delegates of the Ministry of Transport

30th August 2019

BMVITUMCREATE hosted the delegates, Mr Zielke and Mr Damm, from The German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) at our office this week. We discussed our research work and innovations and had a productive exchange with our guests. I gave a presentation on CityMoS and showed how novel simulation tools can help mitigate traffic problems.

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