Sam Coogan received the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award at the 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, which took place December 12-15, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. He is an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Coogan’s coauthors on the paper are Ebru Aydin Gol (Middle East Technical University), Murat Arcak (University of California, Berkeley), and Calin Belta (Boston University). Entitled “Traffic network control from temporal logic specifications,” this paper proposes an approach for controlling a traffic network of signalized intersections to accomplish complex control objectives specified in a formal language known as temporal logic.

Temporal logic allows for specifying precisely and unambiguously the desired behavior of the network and can accommodate goals such as congestion avoidance and fair service of all queues in the network. The paper further identifies and exploits structural properties particular to the dynamics of traffic flow that allow for efficient computation of feedback controllers that can be formally shown to satisfy these objectives.