Participant Support Costs for SP0039647

Project Overview This proposal seeks participant support funds for the 22nd International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT), to be held July 24 – 26, 2017 on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The ISTTT series was founded in 1959 by the late Robert Herman, distinguished cosmologist, physicist, and operations researcher widely recognized as the “father of traffic science”, and founder of Transportation Science, the field’s most prestigious scientific journal. The symposium provides an international forum for the advancement of transportation and traffic theories and their application. As such, it has served as the primary forum for the development of the core scientific knowledge for the then nascent multi-disciplinary domain of transportation systems. Originally held every three years, it switched to a two-year interval in 2007. It continues to provide forums where those engaged in cutting-edge research on transportation and traffic theory, exchange their results, discuss research issues, and identify future directions of transportation research. The symposium deals with both scientific and operational aspects of transportation and traffic, spanning all modes of transport, and covering freight as well as private and public transport. The field of transportation is continually undergoing change driven by new technologies and global circumstances resulting in high quality papers on new research as well as on established themes. To ensure a stimulating broad base exchange of ideas, the coming symposium will showcase 36 original papers selected from 327 submissions. The selected papers will be published in a hard copy of the ISTTT22 Proceedings and in electronic version. Additionally, the papers will appear in special issues of Transportation Research, primarily Part B (Methodological) and Part C (Emerging Technologies). Furthermore, up to 12 papers may be invited for presentation in poster form and included in the electronic version of the Proceedings. The funds requested from NSF would support several key elements of the symposium, namely: the meeting space including audio-visual support costs; travel support for selected participants (primarily those in early stages of career); and the symposium registration fees (and other costs) for selected advanced graduate students. Funds are requested for this latter item to encourage attendance among students who come from groups that have been historically under-represented in science and engineering.