The Engineer's Impact - Yili (Kelly) Tang

Your inside look at faculty’s research and its effect on society

In this new Q&A series, we’ll feature Western Engineering faculty members to gain a succinct overview of their research, understand its impact on society, and discover intriguing little-known facts.

Meet Assistant Professor Yili (Kelly) Tang who has a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  


Can you describe your research?

My research focuses on bridging the transportation theories to the artificial intelligence and advanced emerging technologies. And this includes operational optimizations and the machine learning strategies as well as decision support tools and systems to help individual travelers, to help stakeholders and policymakers to have a better transportation system and service.

I'm currently leading the Mobility Technology Group, where we have about 20 members, including postdoctoral associates, PHD students and master students. We also have excellent undergraduate research assistants that are working together to improve our transportation system and to understand how people's behaviour has the impact on our daily travels and on our system and transportation effects.

How does your research impact society in everyday life?

In our research, we looked at "win-win-win" conditions. One is that we aim to reduce the travel times for individual travelers. The second is we're aiming to improve the convenience for the society so that everyone has great accessible, transportation services. And the third that we look at how can we improve the infrastructure revenue as well as reduce the cost.

So, for example, one of our research streams is focusing on the electric vehicle and infrastructure. We analyze what are people's preferences on using the electric vehicle. When and where they prefer to charge. And from there that we're designing how the charging station should be located, and how our electric vehicle infrastructure, such as a power grid, such as the charging station, should be designed to fit travelers' preferences.

Another one of our research focuses is on the autonomous vehicle network that we look at how can we optimize operations of autonomous vehicles, and how can autonomous vehicles or automations can improve people's quality of life and improve, people's travel experience. 

What’s an interesting, little-known fact related to your research?

One of the most famous observations in transportation is “Braess’s paradox,” which is the scenario where adding more roads to a road network, in certain cases, can increase overall congestion and travel times.

The theory behind this paradox is that individual travel choices are made based on personal costs without considering the effects on other network users. The dynamic interactions of all individuals' behaviors can result in higher congestion in certain cases. This paradox can also be proved by leveraging theories from game theory, travel behaviors, and network topology. I regularly teach these scenarios in CEE and ECE graduate and undergraduate courses.

Braess’s paradox underscores the importance of careful and systematic analyses of urban transportation network designs and investments in cities and communities. It is the underlying principle behind many traffic control schemes such as ramp metering on highways, traffic lights, traffic restrictions, and more.