Janody Pougala research projects

This page reports only the academic work registered in the databases of the Transport and Mobility Laboratory, and is not necessarily a comprehensive list of the work by Janody Pougala.

More information may be available here

E-Bike City
Sponsor: Swiss Federal Office of Energy
Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Janody Pougala (PM)
Period: September 01, 2022-December 31, 2025
This project has the following content: Transport policy is currently not finding a way out of its dilemma; the imminent need to decarbonize a sector fast which has barely moved in the recent past and the social requirement to maintain and increase accessibility across all modes, but not to encourage sprawl while still allowing further decreases in the generalised cost of travel by new technologies and business models. We propose to use a radical departure from previous proposed ideas to enable the policy and transport industry to begin thinking from a different starting point. The design idea is to reallocate 50% of the existing urban road space to e-bikes, bicycles, and other micromobility modes and to assess what this change could achieve in terms of accessibility, generalised costs of travel, changes in daily life and reductions in emissions and CO2. The project will integrate careful involvement of the various stakeholders from citizens, cities, firms to interest groups, but will also provide the materials needed to communicate the ideas and their equity impacts visually and verbally at the required levels of complexity.
Activity scheduling an rhythmic style: multi-day modeling of mobility habits
Sponsor: School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Team: Janody Pougala (PI&PM), Marija Kukic
Period: October 01, 2020-October 01, 2021
A growing body of research shows that the traditional approaches employed to plan and forecast travel behaviors are not equipped to deal with the heterogeneity of behaviors over time, space, and social spheres. Therefore, travel policies struggle to reconcile social inclusivity, sustainability and network efficiency. Two ENAC laboratories propose to join forces, in mathematical modeling and quantitative sociology, to develop a novel multi-day activity-scheduling framework to forecast travel demand. Integrating day-to-day correlations in travel behaviors will lead to a better understanding of the motives behind travel decisions, and will unveil more facets of individual decision making for better predictions of their daily mobility choices. This research uses the MOBIS dataset, a 8-week / 3700-respondent travel survey conducted in Switzerland in 2019. The forecasting model will be applied to the Swiss synthetic population and several scenarios will be considered.
Optimization of individual mobility plans to simulate future travel in Switzerland
Sponsor: Innosuisse (Swiss Innovation Agency)
Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Tim Hillel (PM), Janody Pougala, Rico Krueger
Period: September 01, 2020-March 01, 2022
This project, joint with Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) will develop a new activity-based modelling approach based on optimization of individual daily mobility plans. This approach will be implemented within SBB's existing nationwide model for Switzerland for investment and service planning decisions for future transportation.
Activity based travel demand forecasting
Sponsor: Swiss Federal Railways (SBB)
Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Tim Hillel (PM), Janody Pougala
Period: March 01, 2019-March 01, 2020
This research project aims to update and improve the microscopic activity-based demand model developed and maintained by SBB. Specifically the research intends to address the following questions: 1. Ownership of mobility instruments: Which metrics and specifications can be added to the current model, in order to improve its ability to forecast mid-and long-term ownership of mobility instruments? More specifically, how can the notion of accessibility be integrated to the current model to capture more complex mode interactions? 2. Mode choice model: Can a tour-based approach be used to model mode choice? In addition, how can the processes to estimate destination and mode choice (currently nested) be combined to generate results that are consistent with observed mobility behaviors at different time horizons (short, mid, and long-term)? 3. Tour and activity generation: How can the generation of tours and activity patterns be combined to allow modelling of joint decisions?
Janody Pougala