Unit

Transportation and Mobility Laboratory

Laboratory
Related people (23)
Michel Bierlaire
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.   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.
Dominique de Werra
Dominique de Werra was born in Switzerland in 1942. He graduated in physical engineering at EPFL in 1965, and in 1969, a doctorate in technical sciences. From 1969 to 1971 he was professor at Waterloo University (Canada) in the Management Sciences department. He has been a visiting professor in various European and American High Schools. In 1971 he became professor of Operations Research in Mathematics at EPFL. In 1990, he was appointed Vice President of EPFL and in addition, he became Director of training in autumn 1993. His research focuses on discrete mathematics (combinatorial optimization, graph theory, algorithms, etc.) and their applications to industrial and informatics technology. He has participated and directed several interdisciplinary projects in production, distribution, energy and scheduling. His work leads in particular to the time management problem and specifically to calendar management for important projects (sports, education, etc.). In 1987-1988, he chaired the EURO association which encompasses the Operational Research in Europe. He is Dr. h.c. of Paris University and Ecole Polytechnique in Poznan, and he was the winner of the European gold medal (EURO) of Operational Research in 1995. In March 2000 he was appointed Dean of International Affairs.
Thomas Liebling
Thomas M. Liebling (http://roso.epfl.ch) is Mathematics Professor Emeritus at EPFL (Lausanne), where he taught from 1980 to 2008 and directed the OR group ROSO. He served on the jury of 112 PhD and habilitation theses, 39 as director. He further supervised 150 MS theses and 350 term projects, many of which in collaboration with industry and private and public services. He published over 200 refereed papers, books, and book chapters. Previous appointments were with ETHZ, and RPI; as visiting professor with Cornell, ELTE-Budapest, MIT, PUC-Rio, and Stanford. He received his education from ETH Zurich: MS in EE (1966, automatic control), PhD in operations research (1969; awarded the ETH prize and medal). Mathematics habilitation (1973) with a pioneering probabilistic study on the number of iterations of the simplex method. Postdoctoral fellowship (1970/71) Stanford University with G.B. Dantzig He holds the Science Prize of the German OR Society, is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Scientific Council of ZIB, Berlin. He received a honorary degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima and the Medal of Merit from EPN Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito. Editorial activities: DE (Optimization and Networks) of Management Science, AE of Operations Research, OR-letters, OR-Spectrum, EJOR, Discrete Applied Optimization, and Math. Programming, recurring guest-editor of MPB and DAM. He is Editor in Chief of the MOS-SIAM book series on optimization. He is a founding organizer of the Aussois Workshops in Combinatorial Optimization, and member of the steering committee of LAGOS (Latin American Graphs, Optimizstion Symposium) chaired the MPS Publications Committee, Tucker Prize Committee, and presently chairs its Symposium Advisory Committee. He organized ISMP 1997 at EPFL, with nearly 1500 participants from 63 countries, the largest to date. He has chaired the Conference of Department Chairmen (a position comparable to a provost), the Computer Commission (responsible for the introduction at EPFL of the first Swiss supercomputer), and further chaired the Research Commission over 6 years, he created the Doctoral Award and was its first Jury chair. He belonged to the Board of Trustees of the Swiss National Science Foundation . Much of his research lies at the interface with other disciplines (physics, life sciences, materials science, management, engineering, logistics), focusing on complex systems modeling, simulation, and optimization. His present research interests are in algorithmic game theory and complex particle system modeling and simulation using paradigms from mathematical programming, discrete geometry and probability.
Michaël Clément Louis Ghislain Thémans
Michaël Thémans holds a M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics (University of Namur, Belgium) and a Ph.D. in Operations Research and Transportation Modeling (EPFL, Switzerland). His Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Prof. Michel Bierlaire, was entitled "Numerical Methods and Models Relevant to Transportation Applications". Between 2002 and 2007, he was research and teaching assistant in the Transport and Mobility Laboratory at EPFL. He published 5 papers in international journals in the field of Transportation and Operations Research. He was teaching assistant for 15 courses in Operations Research and Behavioral Modeling. He also supervised 20 master theses and research projects in Optimization and Behavioral Modeling. During the same period, he was working on several large-scale transportation-related research projects, in association with MIT and ETH Zurich as well as transportation professionals in Switzerland (Bureau Robert Grandpierre Rapp, Lausanne, Büro Widmer, Frauenfeld), sponsored both by the Swiss Federal Office of Roads and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Between 2007 and 2009, he was statistician and R&D specialist at the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne. He provided support in statistics and modeling to R&D centers worldwide and was involved in over 50 R&D projects. In parallel to this, he developed innovative discrete choice models to predict consumer purchasing behavior and disseminated these new methodologies to Nestlé markets worldwide. He also designed and analyzed over 40 market research studies for various Nestlé markets around the world. He also gave training in market research and Design of Experiments to R&D community. Between 2007 and 2011, he also holded a position as lecturer at EPFL, teaching a master course in Numerical Optimization. Since 2014, he is lecturer at EPFL, co-teaching the "Global Issues" course entitled "Mobility B" which focuses on transportation systems and logistics systems. Between 2010 and 2014, he was the Deputy Director of EPFL's Transportation Center (TraCE), in charge of the operational management of the EPFL's Transportation Center with the main focus on the business development activities. The main tasks associated with this position were:
  • Develop strategic business partnerships and research projects with private companies and industries as well as public institutions and authorities, at the local, national and international levels.
  • Percolate and highlight EPFL's ongoing research activities in transportation outside EPFL.
  • Obtain external funding to conduct new cutting-edge multi-disciplinary research projects in the field of transportation at EPFL.
  • Management of large-scale R&D projects with industry.
  • Promotion of technology transfer and innovation in all fields related to transportation and mobility.
Between January 2015 and December 2016, he was Deputy of the Vice-President for Innovation and Technology Transfer at EPFL, in charge of seconding the Vice-President Adrienne Corboud Fumagalli in her various tasks. Since January 2017, he is the Deputy of the Vice-President for Innovation at EPFL and the Head of the "Large Enterprises" and "Innovation Projects" Units of the Vice-Presidency for Innovation. He is also in charge of the operational management of 5 Interdisciplinary Centers affiliated to the Vice-Presidency for Innovation. Since May 2017, he also holds the position of Vice-President of the EPFL Innovation Park Foundation. Since mid-2018, he acts as the EPFL’s representative in the Board of Switzerland Innovation Network West EPFL (an innovation-driven network composed of 6 innovation poles in Western Switzerland). Some other activities and affiliations of Michaël Thémans include:
  • Scientific consulting for various private companies and national agencies in Switzerland and in France.
  • Business Development and Fund Raising for various EPFL's startups and spin-offs.
  • Strategic Business Development Advisor for BestMile SA.
Since May 2012, in parallel to his main activity at EPFL, he is partner and Chief Business Development Officer at "6T - Bureau de Recherche", an EPFL's spin-off specialized in mobility analysis. His main scientific expertise is in the design, development and applications of demand models and optimization algorithms, which he successfully used during ten years in transportation, food and marketing contexts. He also has a significant experience in market research and consumer understanding. He also has a strong experience in the transportation demand analysis and in the modeling/optimization/simulation of complex transportation systems. During the years 2010-2014, he has acquired a global knowledge and expertise in transportation thanks to the operational and strategic management of EPFL's Transportation Center (TraCE) which gathers all EPFL's laboratories related to transportation and mobility. He has also developed over the past seven years a strong experience and expertise in large-scale project management, people management, business development and technology transfer from research to business, with a strong focus on partnerships between academia and Large Enterprises in Switzerland and abroad.
Marc-Edouard Baptiste Grégoire Schultheiss
Marc-Édouard Schultheiss is a doctoral student at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology at EPFL. He is interested in multi-day and multi-person activity-travel behaviours analyses, and he questions the effect of habits and routines on the resistances to change in the context of urban mobility practices. His research work focuses on the mechanisms of modal shift and leverages the potential of raw geolocation data and open-data for city planning.

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