Michel Bierlaire (born 9 February 1967) is a Belgian-Swiss applied mathematician specialising in transportation systems. He is Professor of Operations Research at the

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (, EPFL) is a public university, public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded in 1969 with the mission to "train talented engineers in Switzerland". Like its sister institution E ...

(EPFL) and directs the university’s Transport and Mobility Laboratory.

Education

Bierlaire studied mathematics at the

University of Namur A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

, obtaining his PhD in 1996 for research on transportation-demand models supervised by Philippe Toint.

Career

From 1995 to 1998 he was a research associate in the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, where he co-developed DynaMIT, a real-time traffic-prediction tool. Bierlaire joined EPFL in 1998 as a senior scientist, became Associate Professor in 2006 and Full Professor in 2012. He founded the Transport and Mobility Laboratory in 2006 and directed EPFL’s Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2009 to 2017. In 2012 he co-founded the European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART) and served as its first president until 2015.

Research

Bierlaire combines discrete-choice theory, operations research and simulation to analyse travel behaviour, design transport policies and evaluate environmental impacts. His methods have been applied to public-transport planning, logistics, pedestrian dynamics and land-use modelling. He leads Biogeme, an open-source Python package for maximum-likelihood estimation of discrete-choice models. Bierlaire created several massive open online courses, including “Introduction to Discrete Choice Models” on edX, and co-teaches the professional course “Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Individual Behaviour and Market Demand” with colleagues from MIT and UC Berkeley.

Honours and service

* Founding Editor-in-Chief, ''EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics'' (2011–2019) * Associate Editor, ''Operations Research'' (since 2012)

Selected publications

* Bierlaire, M. ''Optimization: Principles and Algorithms''. EPFL Press, 2015. * Fosgerau, M.; McFadden, D.; Bierlaire, M. “Choice Probability Generating Functions.” ''Journal of Choice Modelling'' 8 (2013): 1–18. * Bierlaire, M.; Chen, J.; Newman, J. “A Probabilistic Map Matching Method for Smartphone GPS Data.” ''Transportation Research Part C'' 26 (2013): 78–98.

References

External links

* * {{Authority control 1967 births Living people Belgian mathematicians Swiss mathematicians Applied mathematicians Université de Namur alumni Academic staff of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne People from Namur (city)