Mahmoud Arafat is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Florida International University (FIU). His passion for transportation engineering dates back to his undergraduate days where he scored straight “As” in all transportation-related classes. Building upon his academic success as an undergraduate student, he went on to receive a master’s degree in transportation engineering in 2018 from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Arafat graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA.

At FIU, Arafat’s primary focus is on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and transportation safety. Currently, he is working on a research project funded by the Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Development, and Education Center (STRIDE) titled Utilization of Connectivity and Automation in Support of Transportation Agencies’ Decision Making (Project G3)

“The goal of this project is to provide guidance and utilize case studies to support the agency’s use of simulation of connected and automated vehicles,” he said. “As a result of this project, I have published three technical papers.”

For his dissertation, Arafat is focusing on developing techniques to utilize the safety and mobility benefits of Connected Vehicle (CV) technologies. Arafat’s dissertation is titled Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) to Evaluate the Performance and Constraints of Connected Vehicle-To-Infrastructure Applications on Arterial Roads.

“As part of this work, I developed methods for testing and evaluating the performance of a CV-based Red Light Violation Warning (RLVW) application under actuated signal control in a HILS environment,” he said.

Additionally, the tool he developed supports the testing of CV roadside units (RSUs), as part of a project managed by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) Traffic Engineering Research Lab (TERL). The project connects signal controllers from different vendors to CV RSU and a simulation environment to test and evaluate CV applications and the communicated messages according to CV communication standards.

“This work is among the first to be accomplished in this important topic and has been accepted for presentation and publication in the Transportation Research Board 101st Annual Meeting,” he said.