Course descriptions

The course blends case study discussions, skills development, site visits, and a team-based semester project. Instructors with expertise in a particular area of civil and environmental engineering will present each case study lecture. The purpose of the case study lectures and discussions is to provide students with a general understanding of the topic and to develop an appreciation for the range of methods and tools that can be used to analyze the data. Field site visits to local civil and environmental infrastructure facilities will be held during the regular class time. The team-based semester projects will develop feasible solutions to specific campus/community problems related to CEE, e.g., stormwater management, recycling, energy, structural feasibility studies, multi-modal transportation, etc.

Upon completion of the course and all of its topics, students should have the abilities and tools to: • formulate and solve civil and environmental engineering problems from a systems perspective; • determine optimal economic decisions for civil engineering projects; • assess the value of civil and environmental engineering projects and equipment; • uncover both the advantages and limitations of mathematical models.

This course provides an introduction to the planning, design and operations of transportation systems, operation, and management along with the design, construction, and maintenance of the accompanying structural support layer and materials for the transportation infrastructure. This class will introduce students to the fundamental knowledge of transportation engineering for application to common transportation planning, traffic analysis, and design problems.

Properties and control testing of bituminous materials, aggregates for bituminous mixtures, and analysis and design of asphalt concrete and liquid asphalt cold mixtures; structural properties of bituminous mixes; surface treatment design; recycling of mixtures.

This course covers the structural and functional design of pavement structures for highway and airport situations with emphasis on highways. Structural design examines the direct influence of the vehicles on material and thickness requirements to provide a pavement with suitable design life and good performance. Design considerations include climatic conditions, traffic loadings, life cycle design economics, and rehabilitation. The functional design examines the user aspects, which are primarily smoothness and safety considerations.

Railroad track is the backbone of a railway network and a key element of the vehicle-track system. Its primary functions are to support and distribute train loads, guide rail vehicles and facilitate drainage. The safe and efficient movement of trains requires that track is properly designed, constructed, inspected and maintained. The objectives of this course are to provide the student with a fundamental understanding of basic railroad track engineering principles, concepts, practices and technologies.

Railway traffic control and signaling systems; train performance and scheduling tools; analysis of temporal and spatial separation of trains for safety and efficiency; train movement authority and operating rules, track circuit and wireless train position monitoring technology; interlocking design; railroad capacity modeling tools; economic analysis of traffic control system design, optimization, and selection. Field trip to observe signal system infrastructure and railway traffic operations control center.

This course will prepare you to undertake railroad engineering capital projects by providing a broad understanding of the responsibilities of each party. The class will focus on the following four elements of a railroad project; economic analysis, planning, design, and construction. The economics and planning portions of the course will address route selection, location, equipment, financial and other capacity decisions associated with the construction of additional railroad infrastructure. The design and construction portion will cover the environmental permitting, civil site design, civil track design, cost estimation, scheduling, and phasing issues.

Development, engineering, design and construction of high-speed rail (HSR) passenger transport systems with particular emphasis on the unique engineering elements of HSR technology. Key elements of HSR systems and subsystems including: core systems (trains, power, signal, communication and control), track system and civil infrastructure (earthwork, bridges, viaducts and tunnels). Also covered are basic design and construction of HSR stations and rolling stock maintenance facilities.

As an integrated design course, the principles of geometric and drainage design are presented in the context of the design of a roadway and associated drainage infrastructure. The objective of the course is to introduce students to modern and future challenges, design principles, and standards that control the geometric, drainage, and safety aspects of roadway and roadside design, using analysis tools for roadway, roadside, and drainage design. Appropriate for undergraduates with primaries in Transportation Engineering or Water Resources Engineering and Science, as well as a graduate course for students without prior background in geometric design or drainage design.

Fundamentals of traffic engineering; analysis of traffic stream characteristics; capacity of urban and rural highways; design and analysis of traffic signals and intersections; traffic control; traffic impact studies; traffic accidents.

Role of transportation in urban development and planning; characteristics of urban-person transportation systems and methods of analysis and forecasting of urban-person transportation demand; transportation systems management and capital improvement programming; and emphasis on the needs and activities of metropolitan planning organizations.

This course aims to provide an in-depth overview of the fundamental principles of efficient operations, management, and planning of public transportation systems. In particular, we plan to analyze the capabilities and limitations of transit systems; how to determine the optimal scale and layout of a transit system; and how to practically implement the design and operate the system. Some of the topics are based on recent research findings.

This course uses analytical and numerical models of decision-making to analyze phenomena such as traffic congestion, apply concepts and techniques from economics, and to improve the ways we provide and regulate transportation. Engineers will gain from learning to think rigorously about the fact that the humans in the systems they design make their own choices. The course uses python coding throughout.

The objectives of this professional practice class are for students to engage in career-enhancing activities and interactions with CEE professionals and other CEE students to improve and broaden their near and long-term professional skills.

This 4-hour graduate course aims to introduce the theory, techniques, and practical applications of chemical and mechanical stabilization of geomaterials – soils and aggregates/rocks – used in the construction and maintenance of transportation facilities, i.e., roads, railroads, and airfields. Chemical stabilization includes the use of chemicals, admixtures such as lime and fly ash, and emulsions as compaction aids to soils, as binders and water repellents, and as a means of modifying the behavior of soil. Mechanical stabilization deals with the use of non-biodegradable einforcement, such as geosynthetics and fibers, of geomaterials to improve strength.

EE 506 prepares the student to analyze and design a variety of rigid and flexible pavement systems including airport and highway facilities. It builds on an introductory course for highway pavement and construction materials (CEE 406 or similar pre-requisite). CEE 506 focuses primarily on fundamentals of pavement analysis including pavement stress-strain calculations and heat transfer basics, mechanistic-empirical (M-E) design principles, characterization of pavement material properties for design, pavement material failure criteria (strength and fracture), environmental factors, airfield pavement design, and design of continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) and short jointed slab systems.

This course has been developed to address the urgent needs of the deteriorating roadway infrastructure. The main objective is to educate graduate engineering students about pavement deterioration assessment, efficient rehabilitation techniques, cost analysis, and environmentally conscious solutions. Sustainability assessment methodologies are introduced and cases studies for selecting the most efficient, environment-friendly, and cost-effective approaches are presented.

This course covers occurrences and properties of surficial soils, soil classification systems, soil variability; subgrade evaluation procedures, repeated loading behavior of soils; soil compaction and field control; soil trafficability and subgrade stability; soil moisture, soil temperature, and frost action.

This course will cover the following topics: transportation, inventory, and production cost interrelationships; design and operation of physical distribution systems; one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many logistics systems; inventory management; vehicle routing; terminals, transshipments and terminal systems; facility locations; relevant analytical methodologies. Modeling techniques and solution approaches that reduce cumbersome details of logistics systems into models with a manageable number of parameters and decision variables.

This course will focus on the fundamentals of learning methods and how they can be applied to civil engineering applications. This course will cover the following materials: Markov decision process, partially observable Markov decision process, reinforcement learning, temporal difference, simulated annealing, and multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Note that these materials will be covered in accordance to civil game theory, genetic algorithm, engineering problems.

This graduate course aims to provide students with a general understanding of data-driven transportation safety analysis (which could involve cars, trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, trains, planes, marine vessels, etc.), basic econometric theories that support such analysis, and tools that can be used to analyze a broader spectrum of transportation data. The course will present a number of statistical and econometric modelling and estimation methods for continuous, discrete count, discrete outcome, and duration data. While examples will be drawn primarily from the context of transportation safety and related infrastructures, the methods presented will have a wide variety of applications in other civil engineering areas, as well as related behavioral, economics and marketing analyses. The course will emphasize model estimation and application, the underlying theory and model assumptions will be discussed to ensure that model limitations are properly understood.

Upon completion of the course and all of its topics, students should have the abilities and tools to: • employ quantitative models for urban transportation planning and, in particular, traffic assignment; • understand how to interpret the results of these quantitative models and foster critical thinking regarding their potential and their limitations; • use mathematical modeling for a variety of transportation system policy applications and code mathematical programs in Python; • model and understand externality relationships in an urban transportation system, accounting for congestion and environmental emissions.