Institution: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Biography
Belgian, born in 1967, Michel Bierlaire holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur, Belgium (University of Namur). Between 1995 and 1998, he was research associate and project manager at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA USA). Between 1998 and 2006, he was a junior faculty in the Operations Research group ROSO within the Institute of Mathematics at EPFL. In 2006, he was appointed associate professor in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL, where he became the director of the Transport and Mobility laboratory. Since 2009, he is the director of TraCE, the Transportation Center. From 2009 to 2017, he was the director of Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at EPFL. Since September 2017, he is the head of the Civil Engineering Institute at EPFL.
Michel's main expertise is in the design, development, and applications of models and algorithms for the design, analysis, and management of transportation systems. Namely, he has been active in demand modeling (discrete choice models, estimation of origin-destination matrices), operations research (scheduling, assignment, etc.) and Dynamic Traffic Management Systems. As of December 2017, he has published 113 papers in international journals (including Transportation Research Part B, the transportation journal with the highest impact factor), four books, 39 book chapters, 170 articles in conference proceedings, 160 technical reports, and has given 187 scientific seminars. His ISI h-index is 25. His Google Scholar h-index is 51. He is the founder, organizer and lecturer of the EPFL Advanced Continuing Education Course "Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Demand and Market Shares". He is the founder and the chairman of hEART: the European Association for Research in Transportation. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research and of the Journal of Choice Modelling. He is the editor of two special issues for the journal Transportation Research Part C. He has been member of the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) of Transportation Research Part B since 1995, of Transportation Research Part C since January 1, 2006, and of the journal European Transport since 2005.
Abstract
The talk will be divided into two parts. During the first part, we will provide a general overview of the European Project TRANS-FORM "Smart transfers through unravelling urban form and travel flow dynamics". It is a cooperation between universities, industrial partners, public authorities, and private operators, that aims to develop, implement, and test a data driven decision making tool to support smart planning, and proactive and adaptive operations. The objective of the project is to better understand transferring dynamics in multi-modal public transport systems and develop insights, strategies, and methods to support decision makers in transforming public transport usage to a seamless travel experience by using smart data.
The second part of the talk will "zoom in" a specific aspect of the project: the management of pedestrian flows. Exploiting the full potential of pedestrian infrastructures in order to satisfy the demand induced by public transport modes is key to achieving good level-of-service for passengers during transfers. High temporal variability in demand can lead to high congestion and possibly dangerous situations while the infrastructure is underused moments after. In order to improve the level-of-service experienced by pedestrians, two management strategies will be investigated.