After a very competitive selection process, the Transportation Institute at the University of Florida will be welcoming six new Ph.D. students this fall, who have received the Iva and Norman Tuckett UFTI Fellowship.
One of these students is Stephen Spana, a familiar face here at UFTI. He was part of our 2015 Transportation Research Internship Program (TRIP) and has worked as a research assistant under UFTI affiliate Dr. Siva Srinivasan while an undergraduate student in civil engineering. It was of little surprise to anyone that he decided to apply and was accepted to the civil engineering/transportation Ph.D. program at UF for the 2016-2017 school year.
“My experience over the past two years working with various transportation faculty and students made me want to stay at UF to pursue a Ph.D.,” Spana said. “It was a natural fit for me and I wanted to have a more in-depth understanding of various transportation topics that were introduced to me as an undergrad. I also wanted to expand my knowledge by taking courses outside of the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering in areas related to transportation engineering – like statistics, programming, optimization, data science, and economics.”
As an undergraduate research assistant under Dr. Srinivasan, Spana worked with Ph.D. student Miguel Lugo on researching various topics related to automated and connected vehicle implementation, including liability, safety, and testing. Srinivasan and Spana looked at how planning organizations across states were beginning to incorporate these technologies in their long-term transportation plans, if at all. It was this research, he says, that got him more interested in being involved in transportation research within the department.
“The types of problems that come up in transportation engineering can directly impact the quality of life in cities everywhere,” Spana said. “And emerging technologies like automated and connected vehicles, and ride-sourcing services provide so many new opportunities for research. It’s an exciting time to be in this field.”
Last year, Spana was selected to be a TRIP intern. For his summer project, he worked together with Ph.D. student Liteng Zha to design a ride-sourcing vehicle simulation using an agent-based simulation program called NetLogo. The simulation was used to observe how increasing the range over which a customer can summon a taxi effected properties like customer wait time and customer demand. While Zha was responsible for all of the experimental setup, Spana built the simulation.
“It was all very challenging at first because I had no experience in programming when I started,” Spana said. “But it was equally as rewarding to finish the internship having developed a new skill.”
Spana and Zha continued working on the ride-sourcing vehicle simulation even after the internship ended, for the 2015-2016 academic year while Spana was finishing up his undergraduate degree.
“I have become more involved in the experimental setup and the project turned into a more collaborative effort,” Spana said. “The simulation setting has evolved from a simplified transportation network to a more realistic setting like the Manhattan area.”
They have recently completed the final simulation output and are in the process of finalizing the written report for the entire project.
This summer, Spana has begun working with another Ph.D. student named Zhibin Chen on a different simulation using Netlogo, in which vehicles use different parking algorithms to find parking spaces in a simulated transportation network. He is also formulating his own research plans for his graduate studies and is planning on applying for the National Science Foundation Fellowship Program in the fall.