pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Dr. Yafeng Yin presented his talk, “Modeling and Analysis of Advanced Parking Management for Traffic Congestion Mitigation,” at the University of Washington on December 15 for a PacTrans-sponsored transportation seminar. In this talk, Dr. Yin discussed how the proliferation of smart phones provides tremendous opportunity for addressing parking management. Current applications direct drivers to real-time availability and price information for parking spaces, and even allow users to reserve spaces. Dr. Yin also outlined a game-theoretical approach to examine the competition for downtown parking spaces, and parking reservation and temporal travel patterns of downtown areas.

His talk attracted over forty participants from local agencies, companies, and research institutes. Parking management using mobile phone and other information technologies plays an important role in congestion mitigation in metropolitan areas.

Dr. Yin is an associate professor at the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering and the director of Transportation Research Center, University of Florida. He works in the areas of transportation systems analysis and modeling, and has published over 70 refereed papers in leading academic journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part C and serves on the editorial boards for another five transportation journals such as Transportation Research Part B. He is also a member of Transportation Network Modeling Committee of Transportation Research Board. Dr. Yin received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Prior to his current appointment, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California at Berkeley between 2002 and 2005. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a lecturer at Tsinghua University.