Dr. Lily Elefteriadou delivered a presentation as part of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar Series, also sponsored by the Center for Accessibility and Safety for an Aging Population (ASAP) and FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. Her presentation was titled "Driver Behavior and Characteristics and Their use in Traffic Modeling"

Dr. Elefteriadou is a Professor and Director, University of Florida Transportation Institute (UFTI) Engineering School for Sustainable Infrastructure and the Environment (ESSIE) University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Dr. Elefteriadou's research focus is on traffic operations, traffic flow theory and simulation. She is the principal investigator of the US DOT-funded Regional University Transportation Center for Region 4 (Southeast Transportation Research Innovation Development and Education, or STRIDE). STRIDE involves seven other universities in the southeast, and is funded with $6.8 Million from the US DOT plus an equal amount of cost sharing from non-federal sources (period of performance is Jan. 2012 to Jan. 2017). STRIDE focuses on issues of livability, safety, and economic competitiveness. Dr. Elefteriadou has served as the principal investigator for several other federal and state projects, funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Highway Administration, PennDOT, and FDOT. She has authored or co-authored nearly 200 publications and reports related to traffic operational quality and highway design, as well as a textbook titled "Introduction to Traffic Flow Theory".

Dr. Elefteriadou received the following awards: 2015 ASCE James Laurie Prize for her contributions to highway capacity analysis; the 2015 ARTBA Ethel S. Birchland Lifetime Achievement Award; the 2003 PSES Outstanding Research Award from the College of Engineering at Penn State where she was a faculty member; the Kisinger Campo & Associates Corp. Term Professorship Award from the Univ. of Florida in Sept. 2005; the Transportation Research Board's Fred Burggraff award for excellence in research in Jan. 2001; and a Fulbright Scholarship to perform research at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, Sept. - Dec. 2001.

Dr. Elefteriadou received her Graduate Diploma in Surveying and Environmental Engineering, (five year program) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in June 1987. She received her M.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, in June 1990, and her Ph.D. in Transportation Planning and Engineering from NYU Polytechnic, New York, in June 1994.

Dr. Elefteriadou's presentation's abstract is shown below:

Traffic modeling has frequently considered and accounted for variability in driver behavior and characteristics. For example, microscopic traffic simulators have the capability to replicate vehicular movements (such as lane changing) considering driver characteristics to a significant level of detail. Such traffic simulators can typically replicate traffic streams with several different driver types which are based on driver aggressiveness.

Vehicular movements (such as car following) are then determined based on the respective action of the particular driver type. However, a limited amount of research has been reported to categorize driver types or to link particular driving actions with a set of driver types and their characteristics. Car-following, lane changing, and gap acceptance algorithms have rarely been calibrated to match various driver types, and it is not always clear how micro-simulators incorporate driver behavior aspects into these algorithms.

This presentation will describe two approaches to collecting driver behavior and characteristics-related data so that they can be used to improve traffic micro-simulators. The first approach is based on focus groups, while the second is based on in-vehicle field data collection with an instrumented vehicle. The presentation will describe these two data collection approaches and will provide three example applications related to freeway merging, car-following, and arterial lane changing.