2026 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award
Professor Christos Cassandras, has been awarded the 2026 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) Outstanding Research Award “For Contributions to Optimal and Safe Control of Connected Automated Vehicles in Intelligent Transportation Systems”. His research focuses on transforming urban mobility through networks of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) that communicate with one another and with transportation infrastructure to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion, enhance safety, and increase overall transportation efficiency.
This new book presents the concept of Control Barrier Function (CBF), which captures the evolution of safety requirements during the execution of a system and can be used to enforce safety. It discusses how safety can be guaranteed via both theoretical and application perspectives and how it can be easily implemented in real-time systems that require high-frequency reactive control. Applications include autonomous driving, robotics, and traffic control.
mber 2021. The book, originally published in 1999, is a comprehensive introduction to the field of discrete event systems, offering a breadth of coverage that makes the material accessible to readers of varied backgrounds. The book emphasizes a unified modeling framework that transcends specific application areas, linking the following topics in a coherent manner: language and automata theory, supervisory control, Petri net theory, Markov chains and queueing theory, discrete-event simulation, and concurrent estimation techniques. The third edition is a “superset” of the second one, with new material based on the teaching of discrete event systems courses by the two co-authors at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. They reflect active research trends and new topics in discrete event systems since the publication of the second edition, as more thorough coverage of existing topics.
