Publications by Michel Bierlaire

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Data on the entire population is almost never publicly available. Moreover, there is an alarming trend of discontinuing the exercise of conducting full Census in many countries (Belgium, Switzerland, etc.). In this context, population synthesis techniques have been developed for policy analysis and forecasting. Currently, the focus is on treating synthesis as a fitting problem. For instance, Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) and Combinatorial Optimization based techniques. The key shortcomings of fitting

The principal concept of navigation is to start from a known (initial) position and to ensure a continued and reliable localisation of the user during his/her movement. The initial position of the trajectory is usually obtained via GPS or defined by the user. Consider a pedestrian navigation system which contains a set of inertial sensors, connected with a map database. In the urban environment and indoors the localisation depends entirely on the measurements from the inertial sensors. The trajectory is def

We propose a framework to find optimal price-based policies to regulate markets characterized by oligopolistic competition and in which consumers make a discrete choice among a finite set of alternatives. With this framework, we can include general discrete choice models available in the literature to capture heterogeneous consumer behavior. In our work, consumers are utility maximizers and are modeled according to random utility theory. Suppliers are modeled as profit maximizers, according to the tradition

In Switzerland, the largest railway stations are called "RailCities" by the Swiss Railways. It emphasizes their transformation into place to live and perform several different activities, similar to a small-scale city. Similar concerns than in urban areas are increasing: escalating costs of new infrastructure, increasing concerns regarding traffic congestion, scarcity of land use. Pedestrian demand management strategies would allow to modify individual travel behavior. The activity-based approach models the

Microsimulation of urban transportation and land use evolution require base year, individual characteristics and disaggregate locations of the households and persons living in the study area. On the other hand, mainly due to privacy reasons, at best the census and travel survey, which are the primary sources of the data, provide only cross tabulations at various level of spatial aggregations (sector, commune, region, and country) and a small sample of the individual level information (microdata) that usuall

A recent internet based survey of over 35'000 samples has shown that when different human observers are asked to assign labels to static human facial expressions, different individuals categorize differently the same image. This fact results in a lack of a ...

This research investigates the measurement of perceptions by means of adjectives freely reported by respondents in semi-open questions. The objective of this work is to use these adjectives as indicators of perceptions in hybrid choice models (HCM) in order to derive demand indicators. Perceptions are indeed assumed to impact choice significantly and this type of data has not been integrated yet into HCM.We exploit a quantification of the adjectives performed by external evaluators (called experts). Given t

Car-sharing business provides members access to a fleet of shared-use vehicles in a network of locations on a short-term, as-needed basis. It allows individuals to gain the benefits of private vehicle use without the costs and responsibilities of ownership. The primary advantage of car sharing as opposed to the car rental business is that it provides flexibility of using the vehicles for shorter periods of time. Secondly if you are a registered customer of the company, the process of accessing and using the

UrbanSim is an integrated transportation land-use model that has been under development since the late 1990s. It has received a significant amount of attention in the integrated modeling community. It is well known for its disaggregated approach. A number ...

Specifying utility functions is a key step towards applying the discrete choice framework for understanding the behaviour processes that govern user choices. However, identifying the utility function specifications that best model and explain the observed ...

The role of discrete choice models in decision-making support has significantly grown during the past 20 years. This is particularly true in the context of marketing and transportation, where it is critical to understand and forecast choice behavior in a detailed way. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of recent methodological developments in this area, with a specific focus on the difficult problem of route choice modeling in transportation. The multinomial logit (MNL) model is probably the

In this paper, we present a spatial branch and bound algorithm to tackle the continuous pricing problem, where demand is captured by an advanced discrete choice model (DCM). Advanced DCMs, like mixed logit or latent class models, are capable of modeling de ...

When using random utility models for a route choice problem, choice set generation and correlation among alternatives are two issues that make the modelling complex. In this paper, we propose a modelling approach where the path overlap is captured with a subnetwork. A subnetwork is a simplification of the road network only containing easy identifiable and behaviourally relevant roads. in practise, the subnetwork can easily be defined based on the route network hierarchy. We propose a model where the subnetw

Ride-sourcing services offered by companies like Uber and Didi have grown rapidly in the last decade. Understanding the demand for these services is essential for planning and managing modern transportation systems. Existing studies develop statistical mod ...

We solve a rich routing problem inspired from practice, in which a heterogeneous fixed fleet is used for collecting recyclable waste from large containers over a finite planning horizon. Each container is equipped with a sensor that communicates its level ...

This paper aims to investigate the combination of exogenous and dynamic endogenous variables in professional high mobility patterns. It is based on a panel dataset of the Job Mobilities and Family Lives in Europe research project conducted between 2007 and ...

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 are investigated. Firstly, the utilization of gates to control the

Microsimulation of urban systems evolution requires synthetic population as a key input. Currently, the focus is on treating synthesis as a fitting problem and thus various techniques have been developed, including Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) and Combinatorial Optimization based techniques. The key shortcomings of fitting based procedures include: a) synthesis of only one weighting scheme, while there can be many solutions b) due to cloning rather than true synthesis of the population, losing the h

Michel Bierlaire

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Synthesizing Data on Agents and Their Associations: A Simulation and Graph Theoretic Approach

Bayesian Inference for Autonomous Personal Localisation Indoors

Price-based regulation of oligopolistic markets under discrete choice models of demand

Activity pattern modeling: A path choice approach

A new approach to synthesize heterogeneous agents and their associations for urban microsimulations

Modelling human perception of static facial expressions

Using semi-open questions to integrate perceptions in choice models

Optimizing Locations for a Vehicle Sharing System

Development of Prototype UrbanSim Models

Bayesian Automatic Relevance Determination for Utility Function Specification in Discrete Choice Models

Location Optimization for a Vehicle Sharing Service

Recent methodological developments in discrete choice models

A Spatial Branch and Bound Algorithm for Continuous Pricing with Advanced Discrete Choice Demand Modeling

Capturing Correlation in Route Choice Models using Subnetworks

A data fusion approach for ride-sourcing demand estimation: A discrete choice model with sampling and endogeneity corrections

Simulation based Approach for Agents Synthesis in Large-Scale Urban Systems Modelling

Waste collection inventory routing with non-stationary stochastic demands

Professional cyclic high mobility: modelling state transitions

Two management strategies for improving passenger transfer experience in train stations

Population Synthesis: A Different Perspective