The Purdue transportation student team Boiler Hackers (Xinwu Qian, Wenbo Zhang, Shubham Agarwal, and Hemant Gehlot) recently won the 2016-2017 IATR HACK-A-THON final competition.

The participants were provided with the data from industry, regulators, and city agencies, to develop their innovative solutions to promote shared mobility and multi-modal integration, enhance equity in transportation services, and increase vehicle safety or reduce motor vehicle crashes.

Team Boiler Hackers proposed the idea of serving autonomous electric taxis at existing urban parking facilities. The team mined the data to analyze the social benefits of this next generation taxi service, investigated the optimal choice of facilities, and designed an online learning algorithm to efficiently redistribute vacant taxi fleet among the facilities for maximizing the system efficiency.

Prof. Satish Ukkusuri is a faculty advisor to this team.