Nagurney Leads Team That Translates Influential Paper on Paradox in Transportation Planning

Nov. 15, 2005

Contact:

Patrick J. Callahan 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Anna Nagurney of the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the leader of a team that has translated a 1968 paper on the Braess paradox that states that within some types of transportation networks, the addition of a new road may not improve travel time, and instead may make everyone worse off. The original article, written by Dietrich Braess and published in German, will appear in English in the November issue of the journal Transportation Science, the top journal in the field.

Demand for a translation of the 1968 article, “Uber ein Paradoxon aus der Verkehrsplanung,” by Braess, had been growing, and in February 2005, Braess contacted Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School about assisting him with a translation. He noted that it was essential to have someone involved in the project who is both well-versed in the subject of transportation science who could do the scientific translation within the context of the state-of-the-art at that time and now.

Braess, Nagurney, and Tina Wakolbinger, a doctoral student in management science at the Isenberg School and a native of Austria, translated the paper. The translation, “On a Paradox of Traffic Planning,” along with a preface by Nagurney and David Boyce of Northwestern University, appears in the November 2005 issue of Transportation Science.

Cities such as New York as well as Stuttgart have experienced the Braess paradox. With the advent of the Internet and its growth and associated congestion, coupled with decentralized decision-making on that “non-cooperative” network, the Braess paradox has even been rediscovered by computer scientists.

Braess is currently on the Faculty of Mathematics at Ruhr-University Bochum in Bochum, Germany. His webpage is:
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Dietrich.Braess/#paradox.

Nagurney is the director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School. During 2005-2006, she is a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University researching dynamic networks and applications. Contact her at 413/545-5635 or nagurney@gbfin.umass.edu

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