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. It is unclear how the nutritional needs of Houston’s vulnerable populations will be served when the next devastating weather event strikes the region, given that the city is already experiencing multiple disasters, including COVID-19, economic disruptions, and systemic food insecurity. The Houston Food Bank (HFB) collaborates with over 1,500 partners to address the needs of families experiencing food insecurity. Through a community-driven approach, this project brings together **civic collaborators with university researchers** to align HFB’s food distribution strategy to match food insecurity during multiple disaster profiles. Our project will **develop indicators of individual and community equity** for food distribution during pandemics and extreme weather events; **design a network organizational resilience index** for food bank networks and interventions to improve network resilience; **develop and validate a predictive tool for infrastructure vulnerability**, and **develop and validate an artificial-intelligence based decision-making tool** for determining the locations of food distribution hubs and their food allocation.

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. The novelty of the project lies in a community-driven participatory approach that integrates both social and technical dimensions, bringing transformational change to EV ownership and electrification of smart public transportation. This will be achieved using a **data-driven model** that integrates real-time data from micro-transit, fixed-route transit, and carpooling services to predict and overcome the uncertainties of traffic conditions, which would result in uncertain travel times and poor reliability.

Public-transit systems face a number of operational challenges: (a) changing ridership patterns requiring optimization of fixed line services, (b) optimizing vehicle-to-trip assignments to reduce maintenance and operation codes, and (c) ensuring …

Modern intelligent urban mobility applications are underpinned by large-scale, multivariate, spatiotemporal data streams. Working with this data presents unique challenges of data management, processing and presentation that is often overlooked by …

Electric vehicles (EVs) are critical to the transition to a low-carbon transportation system. The successful adoption of EVs heavily depends on energy consumption models that can accurately and reliably estimate electricity consumption. This article …