calit2

Richie Collects Transportation Engineering Award

 

Gian Mario Maggio
Ritchie
Calit2 academic affiliate Stephen Ritchie, director of UC Irvine’s Institute of Transportation Studies, received the prestigious 2010 Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers in October at the society’s annual conference in Las Vegas. The award recognizes innovative or noteworthy planning, design or construction of transportation technologies or facilities.
 
Ritchie, a UCI professor of civil and environmental engineering, studies transportation systems engineering and is specifically interested in advanced traffic management and control systems. He focuses primarily on the development and application of new information technologies to support more efficient transportation systems.

Such systems can provide drivers and control centers with real-time data, including estimated travel time, density and other measures of traffic performance. Ritchie also is developing artificial neural networks that can detect traffic incidents on freeways and side streets, as well as algorithms and tools to measure the performance of these systems.

The ASCE, founded in 1852, is America's oldest national engineering society and represents more than 140,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide. In announcing his award, the ASCE 2010 awards website calls Ritchie “among the most distinguished academics throughout the world in the area of transportation engineering.”