Jamol Pender – Beyond Safety Drivers: Staffing a Teleoperations System for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: Driverless vehicles promise a host of societal benefits including dramatically improved safety, increased accessibility, greater productivity, and higher quality of life. As this new technology approaches widespread deployment, both industry and government are making provisions for teleoperations systems, in which remote human agents provide assistance to driverless vehicles. This assistance can involve real-time remote operation and even ahead-of-time input via human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence systems. In this talk, we address the problem of staffing such a remote support center. Our analysis focuses on the tradeoffs between the total number of remote agents, the reliability of the remote support system, and the resulting safety of the driverless vehicles. By establishing a novel connection between queues with large batch arrivals and storage processes, we determine the probability of the system exceeding its service capacity, which drives our staffing methodology.

Short bio: Jamol Pender is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013 where he was advised by Dr. William Massey. He joined Cornell University in 2015, and serves as a Faculty Fellow in the Residence Halls at Cornell. Jamol is a recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, MIF Career Award, and several teaching and advising awards, including the Sonny Yau award for teaching excellence and the Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award. Jamol’s research focuses on how to disseminate information to customers in queues and how this information affects the underlying dynamics in queues. He is very interested in the interplay between stochastic processes, simulation, and non-linear dynamics. Jamol is heavily involved in the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS, where he served as the INFORMS APS 2019 conference co-chair.

The paper in which this work is based on can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.12650.pdf