The Second Martin Lowson Award which is donated by the Lowson Familiy, encourages young researchers to perform high quality research in the field of ATNs. This year, the award has been presented to Waldemar Grabski, a PhD student at the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland. The award was presented in a ceremony during the PodcarCity10 conference in Antwerp, Belgium.
The Award has been issued by ATRA for Mr. Grabski’s paper entitled “Empty Vehicles Management as a Method for Reducing Passenger Waiting Time in PRT Networks”, published in the Journal of Advanced Transportation in February 2016. Empty vehicle management of PRT networks is also the subject of his PhD thesis but in fact, he has been the main programmer behind the PRT micro-simulation software (the Feniks simulator) of the Polish PRT initiative, the Eco-Mobility project (http://www.advancedtransit.org/library/news/polish-prt-system-announced/). The Eco-Mobility project has been carried out at the Warsaw University of Technology and led to a full scale PRT vehicle and a ¼ scale test track.
Waldemar Grabski, became interested in PRT systems and started working on the Feniks simulator with Dr. Jerzy Mieścicki and Dr. Wiktor Daszczuk. Grabski. He implemented, optimized and evaluated different algorithms with dynamic routing, including vehicle behavior within stations. He believes that empty vehicle management plays a key role in PRT logistics and has a great influence on the network performance.
After his PhD, which he expects to obtain within a year, he would like to continue working on PRT systems, and in particular on the development of distributed simulators and vehicle management algorithms for dual-mode vehicles and multi-modal transport networks. He is also interested in the formal specification and verification of concurrent and distributed systems.
