Ang Li
Ang Li is a Ph.D. candidate studying transportation engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main areas of interest include unmanned aircraft systems, traffic management, regional air traffic management, urban parcel delivery, mechanism design, operations research, and machine learning.
Ang initially became interested in transportation because of its importance in the disaster recovery plan after an earthquake hit her hometown of Sichuan, China. The disaster devastated the local transportation infrastructure systems. Many relief goods were dispatched and delivered by flights. The importance of transportation in the rescue process made Ang consider transportation as a career path. “There are a lot of opportunities to make contributions toward a safer, more efficient, and sustainable transportation system,” wrote Ang.
Now entering her second year with NICR, Ang joined the projects “Demand-Side Management of Auto Traffic for Urban Parcel Delivery”’ and “Multimodal Strategies for Mitigating Congestion from Urban Parcel Delivery” as a researcher.
Working with Mark Hansen, Ph.D., and Joan Walker, Ph.D., Ang proposed a framework for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) in the context of parcel delivery in low-altitude urban airspace, including clustering-based unmanned aircraft vehicles path planning, UTM models with conflict resolution, and mechanism design for airspace resource allocation. An extensive numerical analysis was conducted with San Francisco as the case study area, assumed to move 20% of daily packages delivered in 2019 from road to air. The results illustrated the effectiveness and the scalability of the proposed framework.
Currently, Ang and her team are developing a suite of multimodal, congestion-sensitive strategies for urban delivery by integrating traditional motorized vehicles, non-motorized modes, and UAVs. The team collaborated with CUTR for this project.
Ang is extremely grateful to have Dr. Hansen as her advisor and to be working alongside NICR colleagues on projects. She is excited to graduate and pursue a career in academia, and she hopes to continue her research: “Continuous learning opens my mind and perseverance helps solve difficulties in the research. I think a doctoral degree is multidimensional growth and development, not only in academic performance, but also in critical thinking, problem-solving, determination to overcome difficulties, becoming confident and passionate.”
Outside of school, Ang enjoys ballroom dancing, oil painting, downhill skiing, hiking, and swimming. Ang is also a multidisciplinary musician, playing the Guzheng, piano, and bamboo flute.
