News
Best Paper at Winter Simulation Conference 2020
20th January 2021
Together 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
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Publication Summary 2020
2nd December 2020
Affected 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 Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Miami, FL, USA, June 2020.
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DOI, 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.
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Ashna Bhatia, Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff and Alois Knoll, "Autonomous Vehicles as Local Traffic Optimizers," Proceedings of Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2020.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Marco Pruckner and David Eckhoff, "Shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles and the Power Grid: Applications and Research Challenges," Proceedings of Proceedings of the IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe (ISGT-Europe), The Hague, Netherlands, October 2020.
[ DOI, 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 Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Miami, FL, USA, June 2020.
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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.
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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.
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Accepted Research Proposal
1st December 2020
Today 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
Together 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
I 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
The 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 Proceedings of the 22nd Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, October 2019.
[ DOI, BibTeX, 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 Proceedings of the 22nd Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, October 2019.
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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.
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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 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms (HeteroPar), Goettingen, Germany, August 2019.
[ DOI, BibTeX, 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.
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ITS World Congress 2019
25 October 2019
TUMCREATE 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
TUMCREATE 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.
Publication Update First Half 2019
1st July 2019
Since I haven't given any updates on publications, I'll summarise what has happened in the first half of the year in one post. We have published a survey paper on agent-based simulation on heterogeneous hardware in the renowned journal ACM Computing Surveys. Additionally, together with Prof Christoph Sommer and some colleagues we have published a book chapter on the recent developments of our Veins simulation framework. Other publications include one paper at ACM Pads, two papers at the A-ranked conference ICCS (International Conference on Computational Science) 2019. Our collaboration with SMART (MIT in Singapore) was published at KES-STS-19. Upcoming publications include two papers at the ITSC 2019 and one workshop paper at HeteroPar 2019.
Related Publications Jiajian Xiao, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "A Survey on Agent-based Simulation Using Hardware Accelerators," ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), vol. 51 (6), pp. 131:1-131:35, February 2019.
[ DOI, BibTeX, 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, BibTeX, Details] Philipp Andelfinger, Jordan Ivanchev, David Eckhoff, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "From Effects to Causes: Reversible Simulation and Reverse Exploration of Microscopic Traffic Models," Proceedings of Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), Chicago, IL, June 2019, pp. 173-184.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Boyi Su, Philipp Andelfinger, David Eckhoff, Henriette Cornet, Goran Marinkovic, Wentong Cai and Alois Knoll, "An Agent-Based Model for Evaluating the Boarding and Alighting Efficiency of Autonmous Public Transport Vehicles," Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2019), Faro, Portugal, June 2019, pp. 534-547.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Jordan Ivanchev, Alois Knoll, Daniel Zehe, Suraj Nair and David Eckhoff, "A Macroscopic Study on Dedicated Highway Lanes for Autonomous Vehicles," Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2019), Faro, Portugal, June 2019, pp. 520-533.
[ DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details] Chunling Luo, Xinrong Li, Yuan Zhou, Aakil M. Caunhye, Umberto Alibrandi, Nazli Y. Aydin, Carlo Ratti, David Eckhoff and Iva Bojic, "Data-driven disruption response planning for a Mass Rapid Transit system," Proceedings of KES International Symposium on Smart Transportation Systems 2019 (KES-STS-19), St. Julians, Malta, June 2019, pp. 205-213.
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CREATE PI-Series Seminar Talk
7th June 2019
I was invited to speak at the monthly CREATE PI Seminar to share more on the topic – Privacy in the Smart City: Trade-off or Opportunity. I presented the various privacy challenges, that both data collectors and individuals face today, such as the increase of privacy protection which could reduce data utility for researchers and scenarios when individuals would lose their right to their own data. To further emphasize the importance of privacy, the risks of data publishing were highlighted. I showed the ways actual personal data could be obtained through data publishing, even with anonymization, which proved the danger of how the seemingly harmless, published data could be used against an individual. So, how can we continue to enjoy the convenience of new and improved technologies for a smart city without compromising our privacy wholesale? I went on to cite two possible ways in which an individual’s data can be protected – by enabling plausible deniability through differential privacy and by the use of synthetic datasets. I had a lot of fun giving this talk as I felt the topic is timely and the audience was interested, asking good questions in the Q&A session.