Levent Guvenc
· Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace EngineeringOhio State University · Materials Science and Engineering
Active 1992–2024
About
Levent Guvenc is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1985, where he achieved the highest GPA in the College of Engineering. He earned his M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Clemson University in 1988 as a Fulbright grantee, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University in 1992. His professional experience includes a tenure at Istanbul Technical University from 1996 to 2011, where he was a professor and director of Mekar Labs, as well as the European Union Framework 6 funded Automotive Control and Mechatronics Research Center of Excellence. He also served as the chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Istanbul Okan University from 2011 to 2014. Currently, he is a co-founder and co-director of the Automated Driving Lab at Ohio State University, focusing his research on connected and autonomous driving, cooperative mobility of road vehicles, automotive control and mechatronics, and applied robust control. Guvenc has been actively involved in various professional organizations, serving on technical committees related to automotive control, mechatronics, and intelligent vehicular systems, and has held editorial positions in prominent journals. He is an inventor with six patents and has authored or co-authored over 260 technical publications, edited volumes, books, and book chapters. Recognized as an IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2025), he was elected an ASME fellow in 2014.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Engineering
- Automotive engineering
- Transport engineering
- Artificial Intelligence
- Simulation
- Control engineering
- Operating system
- Petroleum engineering
- Mathematical optimization
- Aeronautics
- Environmental science
- Operations research
- Computer network
- Aerospace engineering
- Ecology
Selected publications
Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment · 2021 · 181 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Automotive engineering
- Computer Science
Connected UAV and CAV Coordination for Improved Road Network Safety and Mobility
SAE technical papers on CD-ROM/SAE technical paper series · 2021 · 5 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Computer network
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Having connectivity among ground vehicles brings about benefits in fuel economy improvement, traffic mobility enhancement and undesired emission reductions. On the other hand, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have proven to help in getting aerial data to end users in an affordable manner. When UAVs are equipped with cameras, they can get information about the terrain they are flying over. Moreover, using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies, it is possible to form a communication link between UAVs and the connected ground vehicle networks comprising of Connected and Autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To investigate and exploit the potential benefits and use cases of a broad vehicle network, a microscopic traffic simulator modified previously by our group with the addition of nearby UAVs is used to integrate simulated Connected UAVs flying above a realistic simulation of heterogeneous traffic flow containing both CAVs and non-CAVs. Use case scenarios are defined, where the Connected UAVs in the simulation environment have soft cameras on them that are used to observe traffic patterns when hovering over intersections and to detect abnormalities in the traffic flow when flying over a highway. The information gathered by the Connected UAVs, such as average vehicle speed in the intersection, speed limit on a road segment, queue location and advisory speed are then broadcasted to be picked up by CAVs. The performance of the CAVs in fuel economy and traffic mobility are then analyzed between the baseline case of no UAV communication and the case where Connected UAVs were present. It is seen that having Connected UAVs can help to increase mobility of the nearby road network. Encouraged by the simulation study, a hardware implementation is also investigated and a DSRC based communication architecture is set up between a CAV platform and a Connected UAV. Preliminary tests between the CAV and Connected UAV show that package losses may be an issue in the DSRC communication and optimal antenna configuration for least package loss in the data transfer improves the reliability of DSRC communication between a ground and an aerial vehicle. A 4G internet WebSocket server-based communication architecture is proposed and preliminary testing is reported in an effort to increase the communication range beyond that of DSRC communication, at the expense of slightly increased latency.</div></div>
SAE technical papers on CD-ROM/SAE technical paper series · 2020 · 13 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Automotive engineering
- Computer Science
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">With the current drive of automotive and technology companies towards producing vehicles with higher levels of autonomy, it is inevitable that there will be an increasing number of SAE level L4-L5 autonomous vehicles (AVs) on roadways in the near future. Microscopic traffic simulators that simulate realistic traffic flow are crucial in studying, understanding and evaluating the fuel usage and mobility effects of having a higher number of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in traffic under realistic mixed traffic conditions including both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles. In this paper, L4-L5 AVs with varying penetration rates in total traffic flow were simulated using the microscopic traffic simulator Vissim on urban, mixed and freeway roadways. The roadways used in these simulations were replicas of real roadways in and around Columbus, Ohio, including an AV shuttle routes in operation. The road-specific information regarding each roadway, such as the number of traffic lights and positions, number of STOP signs and positions, and speed limits, were gathered using OpenStreetMap with SUMO. In simulating L4-L5 AVs, the All-Knowing CoEXist AV and a vehicle with Wiedemann 74 driver were taken to represent AV and non-AV driving, respectively. Then, the driving behaviors, such as headway time and car following, desired acceleration and deceleration profiles of AVs, and the non-AVs’ car following and lane change models were modified. The effect of having varying penetration rates of L4-L5 AVs were then evaluated using criteria such as average fuel consumption, existence of queues and their average/maximum length, total number of vehicles in the simulation, average delay experience by all vehicles, total number of stops experienced by all vehicles, and total emission of CO, NOx and volatile organic compounds (VOC) from the vehicles in the simulation. The results show that while increasing penetration rates of L4-L5 AVs generally improve overall fuel efficiency and mobility of the traffic network, there were also cases when the opposite trend was observed.</div></div>
Pre-Deployment Testing of Low Speed, Urban Road Autonomous Driving in a Simulated Environment
SAE International Journal of Advances and Current Practices in Mobility · 2020 · 16 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Transport engineering
- Automotive engineering
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Low speed autonomous shuttles emulating SAE Level L4 automated driving using human driver assisted autonomy have been operating in geo-fenced areas in several cities in the US and the rest of the world. These autonomous vehicles (AV) are operated by small to mid-sized technology companies that do not have the resources of automotive OEMs for carrying out exhaustive, comprehensive testing of their AV technology solutions before public road deployment. Due to the low speed of operation and hence not operating on roads containing highways, the base vehicles of these AV shuttles are not required to go through rigorous certification tests. The way these vehicles’ driver assisted AV technology is tested and allowed for public road deployment is continuously evolving but is not standardized and shows differences between the different states where these vehicles operate. Currently, AVs and AV shuttles deployed on public roads are using these deployments for testing and improving their technology. However, this is not the right approach. Safe and extensive testing in a lab and controlled test environment including Model-in-the-Loop (MiL), Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) and Autonomous-Vehicle-in-the-Loop (AViL) testing should be the prerequisite to such public road deployments. This paper presents three dimensional virtual modeling of an AV shuttle deployment site and simulation testing in this virtual environment. We have two deployment sites in Columbus of these AV shuttles through the Department of Transportation funded Smart City Challenge project named Smart Columbus. The Linden residential area AV shuttle deployment site of Smart Columbus is used as the specific example for illustrating the AV testing method proposed in this paper.</div></div>
Journal of Cleaner Production · 2020 · 55 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Control engineering
- Engineering
Distributed Control of Cooperative Vehicular Platoon With Nonideal Communication Condition
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology · 2020 · 93 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Engineering
- Control engineering
An optimized control approach for the distributed cooperative vehicular platoon was proposed in this paper, considering actuator delay and nonideal communication condition. A hierarchical structure is used to model the vehicular platoon, where the desired acceleration is optimized by CACC controller and the longitudinal tracking controller is proposed to follow it. In the design process of CACC controller, a parameter space approach and linear quadratic regulator (LQR) method are applied to guarantee the string stability and optimized performance. The influence of communication time delay and dropout rate is revealed by the changing of string stable region. Analytical results are verified by numerical simulations of a six-vehicle platoon where the leading vehicle follows the FTP-75 drive cycle speed profile. Furthermore, a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test is carried out with Carsim to simulate a high-fidelity vehicle dynamic model and dedicated short range communication (DSRC) modems as hardware in the loop as well as the control unit to achieve the inter-vehicle communication. The results show that the designed CACC platooning controller exhibits favorable performance in highway driving scenarios. The platooning vehicles display excellent car-following behavior with high accuracy, driving comfort and safety.
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 78 shared
Bilin Aksun Güvenç
The Ohio State University
- 46 shared
Şükrü Yaren Gelbal
The Ohio State University
- 43 shared
Bilin Aksun‐Güvenç
The Ohio State University
- 30 shared
Mustafa Ridvan Cantas
- 27 shared
Mümin Tolga Emirler
Yıldız Technical University
- 18 shared
Ozgenur Kavas-Torris
- 17 shared
Fangwu Ma
Jilin University
- 15 shared
İsmail Meriç Can Uygan
Awards & honors
- ASME fellow (2014)
- IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Distinguished Lecturer (20…
- IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology associate editor (…
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