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Title: Safe and stabilizing distributed cellular flows

Speaker: Taylor Johnson

Abstract: Advances in wireless vehicular networks present us with opportunities for developing new distributed traffic control algorithms that avoid phenomena such as abrupt phase-transitions.

Towards this end, we study the problem of distributed traffic control in a partitioned plane where the movement of all entities (vehicles) within each partition (or cell) is controlled by a single process. We present a distributed traffic control protocol that guarantees minimum separation between vehicles at all times, even when some cell-processes fail by crashing, where no entities on failed cells ever move again. Once failures cease occurring, the protocol is guaranteed to stabilize and the entities with feasible paths to the target cell make progress towards it. Proofs of correctness will be outlined, where intuitively safety is ensured in spite of failures by proper signaling amongst neighboring cells, and liveness is ensured by all cells with a feasible path receiving a signal to move infinitely often.

Speaker Bio

Taylor Johnson is a second year graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works in the Coordinated Science Lab under Prof. Sayan Mitra. Previously he earned a BSEE from Rice University in May 2008. His research is focused on the coupling between physical processes and computational processes, along with models of each.