CPS 300 Handouts
Home ] CPS 300 Handouts ] CPS 300 Project ] CPS 300 Resources ]
-----

CPS 300 Handout 2: The Traffic Project

Project Overview and Goals:

In order to effectively learn about how to conduct research and communicate results, you will work on a real live (but small) research project during the course of the semester.  You will be assigned to a team of four people and you will be responsible for achieving the following goals with your team:

  1. select a broad research topic
  2. define the scope of your research project
  3. do a search of the existing literature about your project
  4. complete an annotated bibliography of the literature about your project
  5. refine and finalize the scope of your research project as a proposal
  6. receive feedback on your project proposal (as well as give feedback on others' proposals)
  7. conduct your research
  8. enjoy fall break

After achieving these goals and returning from fall break, each team of four will be subdivided into two teams of two for the remainder of the semester.  During this part of the course, you will work with your partner to achieve the following goals:

  1. summarize your primary research results
  2. craft a short paper describing your problem, approach, results, and conclusions
  3. receive feedback on your project paper (as well as give feedback on others' proposals)
  4. develop a 20 minute presentation of your research results
  5. receive feedback on your project presentation (as well as give feedback on others' proposals)
  6. submit final project paper
  7. make final project presentation to the entire class
  8. enjoy winter break

Project Topic:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to analyze some kind of traffic system. Apart from a few exceptions, this can be almost any kind of traffic system, including:

Examples of kinds of traffic that are not acceptable for analysis are:

You will be expected to define your problem very carefully. There are any number of ways that you can model a traffic problem. For example, consider the case of car traffic: you might choose to model a single intersection or you might choose to model the Interstate highway grid. Similarly, you might choose to model your system under normal traffic conditions or under emergency conditions (e.g., under a hurricane evacuation order). As another example, consider the case of air traffic: you might choose to model how an airline should arrange its flight schedule and hub airports or you might choose to model how an airport should arrange its terminals, gates, taxiways, and runways.

Project Teams:

Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 Team 4 Team 5
Laura Grit Mark Fashing Emma Buneci Omer Asad Jeannie Albrecht
Abhijit Guria Kathryn Kistler Austin Eliazar Hao He Allister Bernard
Adam Silberstein Kashi Vishwanath Zhihui Wang David Irwin Danxia Xie
Ke Yi Hai Yu   Tingting Jiang  

Project Schedule:

All project deliverables are due at the beginning of class on the day indicated:

Tuesday, 4 September 2001 Post Website with Team and Topic
Thursday, 13 September 2001 Submit Annotated Bibliography
Thursday, 20 September 2001 Submit Proposal
Tuesday, 25 September 2001 Submit Assessment of Another Team's Proposal
Thursday, 11 October 2001 Teams of Four Subdivided into Pairs
Tuesday, 16 October 2001 NO CLASS: FALL BREAK
Thursday, 25 October 2001 Submit Paper (Draft)
Thursday, 1 November 2001 Submit Assessment of Another Team's Paper
Thursday, 8 November 2001 Submit Paper (Final)
Thursday, 15 November 2001 Submit Assessment of Another Team's Presentation
Tuesday, 20 November 2001 Presentations (in class)
Thursday, 22 November 2001 NO CLASS: THANKSGIVING BREAK
Tuesday, 27 November 2001 Presentations (in class)
Thursday, 29 November 2001 Presentations (in class)