François MaréchalPh D. in engineering Chemical process engineer
Researcher and lecturer in the field of computer aided process and energy systems engineering.
Lecturer in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and environmental sciences engineering in EPFL.
I'm responsible for the Minor in Energy of EPFL and I'm involved in 3 projects of the Competence Center in Energy and Mobility (2nd generation biofuel, Wood SOFC, and gas turbine development with CO2 mitigation) in which i'm contributing to the energy conversion system design and optimisation.
Short summary of my scientific carrer
After a graduation in chemical engineering from the University of Liège, I have obtained a Ph. D. from the University of Liège in the LASSC laboratory of Prof. Kalitventzeff (former president of the European working party on computer aided process engineering). This laboratory was one of the pioneering laboratory in the field of Computer Aided Process Engineering.
In the group of Professor Kalitventzeff, I have worked on the development and the applications of data reconciliation, process modelling and optimisation techniques in the chemical process industry, my experience ranges from nuclear power stations to chemical plants. In the LASSC, I have been responsible from the developments in the field of rational use of energy in the industry. My first research topic has been the methodological development of process integration techniques, combining the use of pinch based methods and of mathematical programming: e.g. for the design of multiperiod heat exchanger networks or Mixed integer non linear programming techniques for the optimal management of utility systems. Fronted with applications in the industry, my work then mainly concentrated on the optimal integration of utility systems considering not only the energy requirements but the cost of the energy requirements and the energy conversion systems. I developed methods for analysing and integrating the utility system, the steam networks, combustion (including waste fuel), gas turbines or other advanced energy conversion systems (cogeneration, refrigeration and heat). The techniques applied uses operation research tools like mixed integer linear programming and exergy analysis. In order to evaluate the results of the utility integration, a new graphical method for representing the integration of the utility systems has been developed. By the use of MILP techniques, the method developed for the utility integration has been extended to handled site scale problems, to incorporate environmental constraints and reduce the water usage. This method (the Effect Modelling and Optimisation method) has been successfully applied to the chemical plants industry, the pulp and paper industry and the power plant. Instead of focusing on academic problems, I mainly developed my research based on industrial applications that lead to valuable and applicable patented results. Recently the methods developed have been extended to realise the thermoeconomic optimisation of integrated systems like fuel cells. My present R&D work concerns the application of multi-objective optimisation strategies in the design of processes and integrated energy conversion systems.
Since 2001, Im working in the Industrial Energy Systems Laboratory (LENI) of Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where Im leading the R&D activities in the field of Computer Aided Analysis and Design of Industrial Energy Systems with a major focus on sustainable energy conversion system development using thermo-economic optimisation methodologies. A part from the application and the development of process integration techniques, that remains my major field of expertise, the applications concern :
Rational use of water and energy in Industrial processes and industrial production sites : projects with NESTLE, EDF, VEOLIA and Borregaard (pulp and paper).Energy conversion and process design : biofuels from waste biomass (with GASNAT, EGO and PSI), water dessalination and waste water treatment plant (VEOLIA), power plant design (ALSTOM), Energy conversion from geothermal sources (BFE). Integrated energy systems in urban areas : together with SCANE and SIG (GE) and IEA annexe 42 for micro-cogeneration systems.
I as well contributed to the definition of the 2000 Watt society and to studies concerning the emergence of green technologies on the market in the frame of the Alliance for Global Sustainability.
Michel BierlaireBorn 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. His 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 August 2021, he has published 136 papers in international journals, 4 books, 41 book chapters, 193 articles in conference proceedings, 182 technical reports, and has given 195 scientific seminars. His Google Scholar h-index is 68. 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 of hEART: the European Association for Research in Transportation. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, from 2011 to 2019. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research. 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.
Karl AbererKarl Aberer received his PhD in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. In 2000 he joined EPFL as full professor. Since 2005 he is the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (
NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch
). He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (
SWTR
) from 2003 - 2011. Boi FaltingsProfessor Faltings joined EPFL in 1987 as professor of Artificial Intelligence. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a diploma from the ETHZ. His research has spanned different areas of intelligent systems linked to model-based reasoning. In particular, he has contributed to qualitative spatial reasoning, case-based reasoning (especially for design problems), constraint satisfaction for design and logistics problems, multi-agent systems, and intelligent user interfaces. His current work is oriented towards multi-agent systems and social computing, using concepts of game theory, constraint optimization and machine learning. In 1999, Professor Faltings co-founded Iconomic Systems, a company that developed a new agent-based paradigm for travel e-commerce. He has since co-founded 5 other startup companies and advised several others. Prof. Faltings has published more than 150 refereed papers on his work, and participates regularly in program committees of all major conferences in the field. He has served as associate editor of of the major journals, including the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Artificial Intelligence Journal. From 1996 to 1998, he served as head of the computer science department.
Anthony Christopher DavisonAnthony Davison has published on a wide range of topics in statistical theory and methods, and on environmental, biological and financial applications. His main research interests are statistics of extremes, likelihood asymptotics, bootstrap and other resampling methods, and statistical modelling, with a particular focus on the first currently. Statistics of extremes concerns rare events such as storms, high winds and tides, extreme pollution episodes, sporting records, and the like. The subject has a long history, but under the impact of engineering and environmental problems has been an area of intense development in the past 20 years. Davison''s PhD work was in this area, in a project joint between the Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, with the aim of modelling potential high exposures to radioactivity due to releases from nuclear installations. The key tools developed, joint with Richard Smith, were regression models for exceedances over high thresholds, which generalized earlier work by hydrologists, and formed the basis of some important later developments. This has led to an ongoing interest in extremes, and in particular their application to environmental and financial data. A major current interest is the development of suitable methods for modelling rare spatio-temporal events, particularly but not only in the context of climate change. Likelihood asymptotics too have undergone very substantial development since 1980. Key tools here have been saddlepoint and related approximations, which can give remarkably accurate approximate distribution and density functions even for very small sample sizes. These approximations can be used for wide classes of parametric models, but also for certain bootstrap and resampling problems. The literature on these methods can seem arcane, but they are potentially widely applicable, and Davison wrote a book joint with Nancy Reid and Alessandra Brazzale intended to promote their use in applications. Bootstrap methods are now used in many areas of application, where they can provide a researcher with accurate inferences tailor-made to the data available, rather than relying on large-sample or other approximations of doubtful validity. The key idea is to replace analytical calculations of biases, variances, confidence and prediction intervals, and other measures of uncertainty with computer simulation from a suitable statistical model. In a nonparametric situation this model consists of the data themselves, and the simulation simply involves resampling from the existing data, while in a parametric case it involves simulation from a suitable parametric model. There is a wide range of possibilities between these extremes, and the book by Davison and Hinkley explores these for many data examples, with the aim of showing how and when resampling methods succeed and why they can fail. He was Editor of Biometrika (2008-2017), Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B (2000-2003), editor of the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (2007), Associate Editor of Biometrika (1987-1999), and Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics (1987 2006). Currently he on the editorial board of Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications. He has served on committees of Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Assocation and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician. In 2009 he was awarded a laurea honoris causa in Statistical Science by the University of Padova, in 2011 he held a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University, and in 2012 he was Mitchell Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society and in 2018 was a Medallion Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Nikolaos GeroliminisProf. Nikolas Geroliminis is an Associate Professor at EPFL and the head of the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS). Before joining EPFL he was an Assistant Professor on the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a MSc and Ph.D. in civil engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate Editor for Transportation Research part C and he also serves in the editorial board of TR, part B, Transportation Letters, Journal of ITS and of many international conferences. He is a member of the Transportation Research Board's Traffic Flow Theory Committee. His research interests focus primarily on urban transportation systems, traffic flow theory and control, public transportation and logistics, Optimization and Large Scale Networks. He is a recent recipient of the ERC Starting Grant METAFERW: Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks
Education
Diploma, 2003, Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
M.S., 2004, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Ph.D., 2007, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
