Professor Sun Zhanbo’s team is currently conducting research on green transportation and connected automated vehicles (CAVs), aiming to facilitate more efficient, greener, and smarter next-generation transportation.

Recently, CCTV reported on Professor Sun, a young professor of our university, and his research achievements on green transportation and connected automated vehicles. In the interview, he said, “to equip driverless cars with a ‘smart brain’ for autonomous route/trajectory planning, collision avoidance, and reducing traffic congestion, we need to solve the problem of cooperative decision-making in fine-grained traffic context, and the key to this problem is the so called cooperative decision-making for mixed traffic (CDMMT) algorithm. Our team has successfully reduced the computational time of CDMMT algorithm from the level of minutes to seconds, and now milliseconds, which should meet the needs of real-time applications. The proposed cooperative decision-making mechanism could reduce traffic congestion by 20% in typical traffic scenarios. I hope our research can make future transportation more efficient, greener, and smarter.”

Professor Sun was born in Wanrong, Shanxi Province in November, 1987. As a Doctoral Supervisor of our university, Sun is a member of the Chinese Association of Young Scientists and Technologists, American Returned Scholars Association of W.R.S.A., and the Standing Committee for International Cooperation of the Transportation Research Board in the US. He also serves as the chair of Western Returned Scholars Association of SWJTU. He graduated from the School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2009 and received his doctor degree in Transportation Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) in 2014. He has been with Southwest Jiaotong University since 2016. He won the Zhan Tian-you Railway Science and Technology Award in 2018, and received the Best Paper Award of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) in 2019. He is the PI/Co-PI of 15 research projects funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Science Foundation of the United States, US Department of Transportation, and Major Science and Technology Project of Sichuan Province, etc. He has accumulated over 40 papers in leading international journals and conferences, 1 monograph and 1 textbook in the field of transportation engineering. He has applied for more than 20 patents and software copyrights, among which 6 have been approved. After joining our university, Sun devoted himself to the research of green transportation and connected automated vehicles. In the CCTV interview, he specifically thanked Southwest Jiaotong University for providing an excellent research platform, and hoped that his research could be better used to contribute to the national and local scientific and technological progress and economic development.