I will see if I can find it, not all papers published in the 80's are online. (and I just looked the professor is emeritus at USC now but still around so I'll send him the question too)

Okay, so I'm pretty sure it was done by G.F. Newell (UC Berkeley) I haven't found the paper we discussed in '82 but he went on to publish a 3 part description of traffic dynamics called "A simplified theory of kinetic waves in highway traffic" and reading through the abstracts for those it covers the same territory we were discussing in the systems class I was taking at the time.

Does this help?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019126...!

A simplified theory of kinematic waves in highway traffic, part I: General theory

Also:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019126...!

A simplified theory of kinematic waves in highway traffic, part II: Queueing at freeway bottlenecks

So Dr. Kuehl reminded me that he didn't teach me Linear Systems, he was teaching Electromagnetics at the time. (And no I don't know how I could confuse the two)

I would really appreciate it

yes please do find that paper (or the name of the professor)!

I believe the paper's author was Newell, but the USC professor was Dr. Kuehl (Dr. Cool :-). He was teaching Linear Systems when I was there and always had some really great "real world" applications of the stuff we were learning.

Appreciate the effort