Transportation Cybersecurity

As transportation systems become increasingly connected and autonomous, they are deeply intertwined with digital infrastructure, creating new efficiencies but also critical vulnerabilities. Cyberattacks on vehicles, traffic management systems, or roadside units can escalate rapidly, disrupting mobility, compromising safety, and eroding public trust. Our research examines how these cyber threats emerge and spread across the coupled cyber-physical layers of transportation networks and how systems can adapt in real time to defend against them. By uncovering these dynamics, we aim to enable decision-making under cyber uncertainty, ensuring that transportation networks can anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyberattacks while maintaining operational continuity and resilience.

Infrastructure Disaster Resilience

Natural disasters and extreme events such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires impose sudden, large-scale stresses on transportation and infrastructure systems. Their unpredictable timing, location, and magnitude can trigger cascading failures, isolate communities, and disrupt emergency response efforts. Our research investigates how these disruptions propagate across interconnected networks and how recovery unfolds over time. By revealing the dynamics of disruption and restoration, we aim to guide adaptive planning and response strategies that enable transportation systems to absorb extreme event shocks, reduce societal and economic impacts, and restore critical infrastructure and services swiftly when catastrophic events occur.

Autonomous Transportation

Intelligent transportation technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles are transforming networked mobility and logistics systems by introducing new forms of communication, coordination, control, and services. These technological disruptions promise major gains in safety and efficiency but also create new complexities in how overall system performance emerges from internal interactions among vehicles, infrastructure, and travelers. Our research develops a rigorous understanding of these internal stressors under normal, non-disrupted conditions, establishing the baseline needed to evaluate how external disruptions alter system behavior. By characterizing the collective dynamics of mixed traffic systems that integrate both human-driven and autonomous vehicles, we generate the foundational knowledge required to assess resilience, design robust control strategies, and guide the evolution of future transportation networks.

Infrastructure Aging and Lifecycle Analytics

While external disruptions such as cyberattacks and natural disasters cause sudden disruptions, transportation networks are also shaped by gradual, internal stresses caused by the natural deterioration of infrastructure assets. Bridges, pavements, and other critical components degrade over time, gradually reducing the system’s capacity to withstand and recover from external shocks. Our research adopts a lifecycle perspective, predicting how infrastructure health evolves and prescribing optimal maintenance decisions to influence long-term performance. By linking sustainability and resilience, we highlight how proactive lifecycle analytics strengthens the foundation of transportation networks, ensuring they remain reliable and prepared when disruptive events occur.