NTU-CEE Seminar Series: Associate Professor Zhang Zhipeng
Organized By
CEE Seminar Committee
Host By
Assistant Professor Yan Ran
Topic
Data-Driven Transportation Safety Risk Analysis and Resilience Assessment under Complex External Impacts
About the Seminar
Transportation systems operate in an environment where external impacts (e.g., extreme weather, cascading infrastructure disruptions, human factors) can quickly turn routine transportation operations into complex, high-risk conditions. This seminar focuses on data-driven transportation safety risk analysis and resilience assessment under complex external impacts, aiming to understand not only what fails, but how risk emerges and can be mitigated. It will introduce a unified perspective that links risk identification, causal inference and analytics, and resilience evaluation using heterogeneous operational data.
This talk will highlight methods and methodological framework that leverage the values of multi-source data into vital references for transportation safety modeling and risk analytics, quantify how hazards amplify exposure and trigger failure chains, and measure resilience in terms of absorption, adaptation, and recovery of service.
This seminar primarily focuses on rail safety, while also drawing on ongoing research work in maritime and other transportation modes. The goal is to provide actionable insights for operators and agencies where to prioritize monitoring and maintenance, how to design robust operating strategies under uncertainty, and how to improve the safety and continuity of transport services when external impacts are inevitable.
About the Speaker
Dr. Zhipeng Zhang is current an Associate Professor in the Department of Transportation Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was a Graduate Research Assistant at RailTEC of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015 to 2016 and at Rutgers University from 2017 to 2020. His research focuses on AI-aided transportation safety and intelligent transportation. He is the co-author of two reports published by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
He has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 20 papers in conference proceedings, and also secured 8 granted patents. He has been supported by national, provincial, and ministerial scientific research projects as PIs. Dr. Zhang is currently the associate editor of the Smart and Resilient Transportation and young editorial board member of several journals.
He is also a committee member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) AR016. He has received Outstanding Reviewer Winner in the 2024 Emerald Literati Awards, Outstanding Paper in the 2023 Emerald Literati Awards, and two AREMA scholarships.