A Payne-Whitham Model of Urban Traffic Networks

Title : A Payne-Whitham Model of Urban Traffic Networks in the Presence of Traffic Lights and Its Application to Traffic Optimisation
Date: May 16 2026 Saturday 10:00 am - Noon EDT
Summary :
Urban road transport is a major civilisational and economic challenge, affecting the quality of life and economic activity. Addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach and sustainable urban planning strategies to mitigate the negative effects of traffic in cities. In this paper, we introduce an extension of one of the most popular macroscopic traffic simulation models, the Payne-Whitham model. We investigate how this model, originally designed to model highway traffic on straight road segments, can be adapted to more realistic conditions with arbitrary road network graphs and multiple intersections with traffic signals. Furthermore, we showcase the practical application of this extension in experiments aimed at optimising traffic signal settings. For computational reasons, these experiments involve the adoption of surrogate models for approximating our extended Payne-Whitham model, and subsequently, we utilise the Differential Evolution optimization algorithm, resulting in the identification of traffic signal settings that enhance the average speed of cars and decrease the total length of queues, thereby facilitating smoother traffic flow.

Speakers:
Mauritz Cartier van Dissel is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Graz University of Technology and Junior Researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. His work sits at the intersection of network science and stochastic sampling, where he develops mathematical models to investigate social phenomena, including the emergence of intersectionality in network tie formation and finite-size sampling effects in ranked outputs. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Trento (2022). His broader research interests span time series analysis for multivariate predictions and optimization algorithms for urban traffic.
Dr Paweł Gora is a scientist, IT specialist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur working mainly on applications of AI and quantum computing, especially in transportation and medicine. A graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw (M.Sc. in Mathematics, M.Sc. in Computer Science, and Ph.D. in Computer Science), he was later a Postdoctoral Researcher at Sano and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at Jagiellonian University. He is the Founder and CEO of Fundacja Quantum AI, Chairperson of the Board of QWorld, and Coordinator of one of its local QCousins, QPoland. He is also a member of the Board of the Quantum Technologies Committee of the National Chamber of Commerce. He also cooperates with several startups serving as a technical and business advisor. In the past, he worked as a software engineering intern or research intern at Microsoft, Google, CERN and IBM Research, and was a member of the Council for Digitalization.
Dragoș Manea is a mathematician specialising in mathematical analysis and applied mathematics. He holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Oxford and completed his PhD in Mathematics in 2025. He is currently a Research Assistant at the “Simion Stoilow” Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, Romania. His doctoral research focused on the theoretical and numerical analysis of evolutionary partial differential equations, with particular emphasis on deriving asymptotic results. In addition, he is interested in the numerical treatment of elliptic inverse and eigenvalue problems using non-standard approaches that avoid explicit meshing of the computational domain. Beyond PDE theory, his work also explores optimisation methods and their applications across a wide spectrum of problems, ranging from theoretical questions — such as the asymptotic analysis of solutions to the Schrödinger equation — to practical engineering applications, including the optimisation of urban traffic and aircraft trajectories.

Moderator: Dr. Sebastian Zajac, member of QPoland