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CIISE - INVITED SPEAKER SEMINAR - Cognitive Digital Twin for Resilient and Low-Emission Freight Transportation: The RECOIL Project
Dr. Xueping Li, Professor and
Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025, at 10:30 a.m.
Location: EV 11.119
Abstract
This talk is organized in two parts. The first presents an ongoing ARPA-E–funded research effort to develop a cognitive digital twin of the U.S. backbone intermodal freight transportation system, encompassing road, rail, and waterway networks. The objective of this project is to enhance system-wide efficiency and resiliency while reducing life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The resulting platform, RECOIL (Resiliency and Emission Control through Optimizing Intermodal Logistics), provides a national-scale environment for freight flow planning, scheduling, and multi-modal optimization.
RECOIL integrates an ontology-driven knowledge graph with a high-performance Data Engine capable of discovering, retrieving, and harmonizing heterogeneous cyberinfrastructure sources relevant to intermodal freight. A microservice-oriented Analytics Engine supports advanced computational methods—including stochastic programming, robust optimization, and machine learning—to generate optimized solutions for life-cycle assessment, operational planning, and energy cost projections. The platform enables both “what-if” and “if-what” exploratory analyses and produces route-level freight flow forecasts and scenario projections spanning 2025–2050.
The second part of the talk highlights emerging prototypes from our broader research portfolio—covering digital twins, AR/VR interfaces, and large language model (LLM)–enabled tools. I will also discuss recent developments in agent-based simulation models and the rise of agentic AI, reflecting on how these technologies are reshaping modeling, decision support, and intelligent systems design.
Biography
Dr. Xueping Li is a Professor and Dan Doulet Faculty Fellow in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also serves as Co-Director of the Health Innovation Technology and Simulation (HITS) Lab and Director of the Ideation Laboratory (iLab). His research focuses on complex system modeling, simulation, and optimization, with applications spanning supply chain logistics, healthcare, and energy systems. His work has been funded by federal agencies such as the NSF, NIH, DOE, HRSA, as well as various industry partners. Dr. Li has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications and holds ten invention disclosures. He is a Fellow of IISE and a member of IEEE, ASEE, and INFORMS.