The offline pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDPTW) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem in the transportation community, which has proven to be very challenging computationally. Due to the complexity of the problem, …

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) can be divided into two major categories: offline VRPs, which consider a given set of trip requests to be served, and online VRPs, which consider requests as they arrive in real-time. Based on discussions with public …

Accurately predicting the ridership of public-transit routes provides substantial benefits to both transit agencies, who can dispatch additional vehicles proactively before the vehicles that serve a route become crowded, and to passengers, who can …

Many transit agencies operating paratransit and microtransit ser-vices have to respond to trip requests that arrive in real-time, which entails solving hard combinatorial and sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty. To avoid decisions …

Due to the high upfront cost of electric vehicles, many public transit agencies can afford only mixed fleets of internal-combustion and electric vehicles. Optimizing the operation of such mixed fleets is challenging because it requires accurate …

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications can have significant vulnerabilities, which may be exploited by adversaries to cause considerable harm. An important approach for mitigating this threat is remote attestation, which enables the …

Food insecurity is the lack of consistent and reliable access to nutritious food. In the Houston (Texas) area, over 14% of Harris County households experienced food insecurity before the emergence of COVID-19.

For first responders entering into a post-disaster situation, there is usually a severe lack of up-to-date ground truth. The initial period of time has multiple sources of conflicting information coming in and creating confusion about the situation. …

Public transit agencies are focused on making their fixed-line bus systems more energy efficient by introducing electric (EV) and hybrid (HV) vehicles to their fleets. However, because of the high upfront cost of these vehicles, most agencies are …

This Houston-based project establishes a collaborative process with community and commercial technology partners to accelerate the equitable development of accessible fast charging infrastructure and electric vehicle (EV) ownership for low income families by leveraging regional markets of early EV adopters.