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Transport and Mobility Laboratory: yearly report 2025
Teaching
Spring 2025
- Optimization and Simulation
- Section(s): Doctoral program in Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Lecturers: Michel Bierlaire, Cloe Cortes Balcells, Lea Ricard, Pavel Ilinov
- Number of students: unknown
PhD theses
Defense scheduled in 2025 or after and theses in progress
Ongoing
- Alexis Gumy
- Aux frontières de la mobilité. Vers la construction sociale des « bonnes manières » de se déplacer ?
- Co-supervisor: Vincent Kaufmann
- Marija Kukic
- Modeling the activities of households
- Cloe Cortes Balcells
- Activity-based models and epidemics
- Co-supervisor: Rico Krueger
- Committee: Maya Abou Zeid (AUB), Kai Nagel (TU Berlin), Kenan Zhang (EPFL), Rico Krieger (DTU), Michel Bierlaire (EPFL), Andrew Sonta (EPFL, chair)
- Exam: February 18, 2025
- Tom Haering
- Algorithms for large scale choice-based optimization
- Nicola Ortelli
- Assisted specification of choice models
- Negar Rezvany
- Urban energy demand
- Co-supervisor: Tim Hillel
Masters theses
- Mya Lahjouji
- Section: Civil Engineering
- Extracting activity schedules from MOBi mobility tracking data
- Supervision:Negar Rezvany, Marija Kukic, Michel Bierlaire
- Expert:
- 10/03/2025-11/07/2025
- Amaury Annoye
- Section: Civil Engineering
- TBD
- Supervision:Michel Bierlaire
- Expert:
- 03/03/2025-31/08/2025
- Arturo Cerasi
- Section: Computer science
- Adapting simulation algorithms for generating synthetic panel data at the household level
- Supervision:Marija Kukic, Pavel Ilinov, Michel Bierlaire
- Expert:
- 17/02/2025-20/06/2025
- Jonas Affentranger
- Section: Civil Engineering
- Integrated Optimization and Learning Methods for Transport Re-planning under Uncertainty
- Supervision:Michel Bierlaire
- Expert: Bilge Atasoy
- 10/02/2025-25/07/2025
- Anne-Valérie Preto
- Section: Civil Engineering
- Differentiation of Modal Preferences in Public Transportation: Analysis and Enhancement of the MOBiSim Model for Scenario Simulation in Lausanne
- Supervision:Negar Rezvany, Fabian Torres, Michel Bierlaire
- Expert: Antonin Danalet
- 09/09/2024-24/01/2025
- Quoc Dang Tran
- Section: Mathematics
- Integrating Advanced Discrete Choice Models into the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Decentralized Priority Queues
- Supervision:Tom Haering, Lea Ricard
- Expert: Virginie Lurkin
- 09/09/2024-10/01/2025
Semester projects
- Julien Ars
- A real-time heuristic for the railway timetable rescheduling problem
- Section:
- February 17, 2025-May 26, 2025
- Supervision: Lea Ricard, Negar Rezvany, Michel Bierlaire
- Riad Bitar
- Demand estimation on the RER Vaud
- Section:
- February 17, 2025-May 26, 2025
- Supervision: Lea Ricard, Evangelos Paschalidis, Michel Bierlaire
- Victoria Catherine Arduini
- Gibbs Sampler for Generating Synthetic Longitudinal Data: Tracking Synthetic Individuals Over Time
- Section: Computer science
- February 17, 2025-May 30, 2025
- Supervision: Marija Kukic, Pavel Ilinov, Michel Bierlaire
- Alexandre Stuart
- Étude des potentiels de flux logistiques ayant pour origine/destination le nouveau Terminal Combiné de Monthey
- Section: Civil Engineering
- February 17, 2025-July 30, 2025
- Supervision: Michel Bierlaire, Pascal Bovey, Alexander Wright (Traject SA)
- Melchior Carrier
- Optimization of the IR90/95 rolling stock
- Section:
- February 17, 2025-May 26, 2025
- Supervision: Lea Ricard, Prunelle Vogler, Michel Bierlaire
- Clara Dalon, Quentin Gaillard
- Évaluation de l’impact de l’abaissement de la vitesse et de la mise en place d’une voie dédiée au covoiturage sur le boulevard périphérique parisien sur les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et de particules
- Section: Environmental Sciences and Engineering
- February 17, 2025-May 30, 2025
- Supervision: Michel Bierlaire
- Flore Mueth, Cléa Schieber
- Outil de calcul de l’accessibilité des massifs forestiers en cas d’incendie de forêt
- Section: Environmental Sciences and Engineering
- February 17, 2025-May 30, 2025
- Supervision: Michel Bierlaire, Sébastien Levy
- Mya Jamal Lahjouji
- Pre-study to extracting activity schedules from tracking mobility data
- Section: Civil Engineering
- January 01, 2025-February 06, 2025
- Supervision: Negar Rezvany, Marija Kukic, Michel Bierlaire
- Younis Bouzar
- Optimization of railway maintenance planning
- Section:
- September 09, 2024-January 17, 2025
- Supervision: Lea Ricard, Marija Kukic, Michel Bierlaire
- Alexandre Stuart
- Étude des potentiels de flux logistiques ayant pour origine/destination le nouveau terminal combiné de Monthey
- Section: Civil Engineering
- September 09, 2024-February 27, 2025
- Supervision: Michel Bierlaire, Pascal Bovey, Alexander Wright (Traject SA)
Additional teaching
- Hybrid Choice Models
- Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Individual Behavior and Market Demand, January 29, 2025
- EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Lecturer: Cortes Balcells Cloe
- Assistant(s): Rezvany Negar, Ilinov Pavel
- Nested Logit; Aggregate Forecasting
- Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Individual Behavior and Market Demand, January 27, 2025
- EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Lecturer: Rezvany Negar
- Assistant(s): Haering Tom, Torres Fabian
Seminars
- Prof. Domokos Esztergar-Kiss
- Mobility as a service in theory and practice
- Affiliation:
- May 20, 2025, 14:30
- Rina (Jingyi) Cheng
- Data-Driven Demand Prediction and Optimization for On-Demand Meal Delivery Operations
- Affiliation: TU Delft
- March 07, 2025
- Affiliation: TU Delft
Organization of conferences, workshops, etc.
- Action versus Inaction facing Climate Change: the Symposium
- June 01, 2025-June 03, 2025
- Location: Hotel Europe, Zinal
- Role: Chair
- Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Individual Behavior and Market Demand
- January 26, 2025-January 30, 2025
- Location: EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Role: Founder, organizer and lecturer
- Winter School on Optimization and Operations Research
- January 19, 2025-January 24, 2025
- Location: Hotel Europe, Zinal
- Role: Organizer
Publications
Papers in international journals
- Cortes Balcells, C., Krueger, R., and Bierlaire, M. (2025). Modeling Disease Spread: Integrating Mobility, Awareness, and Behavior, Transportation (accepted for publication on March 22, 2025)
- Ricard, L., and Bierlaire, M. (2025). 50 years of behavioral models for transportation and logistics, EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics 14(100156):.
- Atac, S., Obrenovic, N., and Bierlaire, M. (2025). Bike Sharing Systems: The Impact of Precise Trip Demand Forecasting on Operational Efficiency in Different City Structures , Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research 3(100058):.
- Ahmed, S., Fountas, G., Lurkin, V., Anastasopoulos, P., Zhang, Y., Bierlaire, M., and Mannering, F. (2025). The State of Urban Air Mobility Research: An Assessment of Challenges and Opportunities, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 26(2):1375-1394.
- Ortelli, N., de Lapparent, M., Varotto, S. F., and Bierlaire, M. (2025). An integrated ordered logit and latent variable model for accident injury severity and risk-taking behavior, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 192(104330):.
- Martin-Baos, J., Garcia-Rodenas, R., Rodriguez-Benitez, L., and Bierlaire, M. (2025). Scalable Kernel Logistic Regression with Nyström Approximation: Theoretical Analysis and Application to Discrete Choice Modelling, Neurocomputing 617(7):128975.
- Beine, M., Bierlaire, M., and Docquier, F. (2025). New York, Abu Dhabi, London or Stay at Home? Using a Cross-Nested Logit Model to Identify Complex Substitution Patterns in Migration, Journal of Economic Geography (accepted for publication on January 16, 2024)
Technical reports
- Ilinov, P., Matveenko, A., Tsakas, E., and Mark, V. (2025). Sequential Search with Flexible Information. Technical report TRANSP-OR 250331. Transport and Mobility Laboratory, ENAC, EPFL.
- Ricard, L., Desaulniers, G., Lodi, A., and Rousseau, L. (2025). Chance-constrained battery management strategies for the electric bus scheduling problem. Technical report arXiv:2503.19853. Transport and Mobility Laboratory, ENAC, EPFL.
Speaker in external seminars
- Ilinov, P., Matveenko, A., Rastislav, R., and Rava, d., Efficient Social Defaults. THEEM 2025, Thurgau Institute of Economics at the University of Konstanz, March 21, 2025, Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
- Kukic, M., and Bierlaire, M., Gibbs Sampler for Generating Longitudinal Synthetic Populations. 3rd EPFL Symposium on Transportation Research, EPFL, February 13, 2025, Barcelona, Spain
- Vogler, P., Bierlaire, M., and Meunier, F., Event-based modeling approach for the multi-agents daily scheduling problem. 3rd EPFL Symposium on Transportation Research, EPFL, February 13, 2025, Barcelona, Spain
- Haering, T., and Bierlaire, M., BHAMSLE: A Breakpoint Heuristic Algorithm for Maximum Simulated Likelihood Estimation of Advanced Discrete Choice Models. 3rd EPFL Symposium on Transportation Research, EPFL, February 13, 2025, Barcelona, Spain
- Rezvany, N., Hillel, T., and Bierlaire, M., A strategic dynamic model for integrating housing and transport interactions. 3rd EPFL Symposium on Transportation Research, EPFL, February 13, 2025, Barcelona, Spain
Awards and distinctions
Research projects (4)
- Intermodal freight transportation in Switzerland: demand models
- Sponsor: Swiss Federal Railways (SBB)
- Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Pavel Ilinov (PM)
- Period: December 01, 2024-November 30, 2025
- This project aims to enhance demand modeling in intermodal freight transport through two key approaches: developing a more realistic synthetic dataset based on available data and adapting the activity-based approach for decision-making in freight transportation for Switzerland.
- Multi-objective disruption management for robust railway operations
- Sponsor: Swiss Federal Railways (SBB)
- Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Lea Ricard (PM)
- Period: April 01, 2024-October 31, 2025
- In passenger railway services, a timetable defines the scheduled arrival and departure times of trains at designated stations. When a disruption occurs, the railway operator must establish a disposition timetable, a complex task due to the intricacies of rail operations and the interactions in the network. This research aims to develop a decision-support tool that optimizes disruption management using a multi-objective optimization approach. The tool will account for system constraints while minimizing passenger inconvenience, operational costs, and deviations from the original timetable. Designed with practitioners' needs in mind, it will be integrated into the industrial software Viriato, enabling the use of real production data for algorithm evaluation and refinement.
- 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.
- Migration and Discrete Choice Models (MIGDCM)
- Sponsor: Swiss National Science Foundation
- Team: Michel Bierlaire (PI), Silvia Varotto (PM), Evangelos Paschalidis (PM)
- Period: March 01, 2022-March 31, 2025
- International migration is at the forefront of policy debates in most countries around the world. In industrialized nations, the proportion of foreigners in total population increased from 4.5 to 12 percent between 1960 and 2019, stirring up fears about economic costs for natives, loss of national identity, and integration issues. In poor countries, international migration raises concerns about the brain drain of highly-skilled workers, as college and university graduates have a much greater propensity to emigrate internationally than the less educated. Hence, the questions of how many people migrate (i.e., migration intensity}, which people migrate first or are more likely to migrate (i.e., migrants' selection), and where migrants choose to settle (i.e., migrants' sorting) have been analyzed from all possible angles in recent literature. Specifically, understanding how people revise their decisions about whether to emigrate, and where to, when facing changes in the global environment is of crucial importance for decision-makers.
Miscellaneous responsibilities
Ongoing
- Member of the Editorial Advisory Board, Transportation Research Part C (since January 01, 2006)
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- Director of the Transport and Mobility Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland (since July 01, 2006)
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- Member of the Editorial Advisory Board, European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research (since November 08, 2011)
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- Associate Editor, Operations Research (since January 01, 2012)
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- Member of the International Advisory Committee, International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (since July 17, 2013)
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- Member of the research council, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Bern, Switzerland (since January 01, 2015)
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- Founder, member of the steering committee, European Association for Research in Transportation (since September 09, 2015)
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- Associate Editor, Transport Findings (since October 01, 2018)
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- Member of the International Scientific Advisory Board , Transportation Research Center, Kumasi, Kumasi, Ghana (since November 01, 2018)
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- Member of the Editorial Board, Transportation Research Part B (since December 01, 2018)
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- Member of the Social Commission, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (since April 01, 2023)
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- Member of the Scientific Committee, Fondation Modus, Geneva, Switzerland (since October 14, 2024)
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Bierlaire
Krueger
- Member of the Editorial Board, Transportation Letters (since February 15, 2021)
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Varotto
- Member of the Committee Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics (ACP50) , Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C. (since April 15, 2022)
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Expertise
- Transportation Research
- Operations Research
- Discrete Choice Models
Methods
Modeling, optimization, simulation