Hi! I am Priyadarshan (PD). Welcome to my website. I have a PhD in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on transportation network optimization in the realm of operations research. I am also interested in and work with engineering education research. In my spare time, I enjoy travelling, playing racquetball, kayaking, social dancing, photography, and much more. The rest of this website will give you a glimpse into my academic and non-academic life. My research interests lie in network flow theory and optimization, algorithms, and data sciences.

My academic background is in civil and architectural engineering, with a bachelors degree from IIT Madras and a masters degree from The University of Texas at Austin. In Fall 2017, I started my journey as a doctoral student in the department of operations research and industrial engineering with Dr. Stephen Boyles.

My doctoral work consists of theroetical proofs of convergence for symmetric traffic assignment algorithms, analyzing effects of origin-destination matrix errors onto traffic assignment outputs, convergence criteria analysis of traffic assignment algorithms, and application of traffic assignment problem structure to the railroad electrification problem for the North American network.

In addition to my primary doctoral research, I have assisted other researchers with their work. Two examples include research on post-disaster bridge reconstruction scheduling problem, where we propose a bidirectional search heuristic with customized pruning and branching strategies that exploit specific properties of traffic assignment sub-problem; and a decomposition heuristic for megaregional traffic assignment generating approximate solutions used for warm-starting other algorithms and saving computation time. I assisted the City of West Lake Hills as a consultant for an intersection redesign study focusing on traffic counts, resident survey, traffic simulation, and town hall presentations.

Academics aside, I am an avid traveller, having travelled to 26 countries so far. The highlights of my trips include midnight sun in Norway and jumping in freezing seas in the Lofoten islands, walking to the India-Pakistan border through an active landmine field, trans-US rail trip spanning Washington DC - NY - Chicago - LA - Austin, kayaking around coastal grottos in Portugal, and many others. After all, as St. Augustine said -

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

My future plans include advancing the boundary of transportation engineering, optimization, and engineering pedagogy, leaving my mark on the field in the form of meaningful research and teaching. In particular, my research addresses following specific challenges:

1. Using flow assignment models and routing game insights for rail network electrification, resiliency analysis, and improved scheduling
2. Unifying static and dynamic traffic assignment advances for a tandem operation with provably correct and efficient solution algorithms, with uncertainty analysis
3. Modeling connected and autonomous vehicles using multi-class traffic assignment with link interactions

Some of the commonly used key words in my research include network modeling, traffic assignment models, rail electrification, resiliency analysis, algorithm convergence, and electric vehicles. Feel free to drop me an email if you want to talk about any of these!