Publications by Michel Bierlaire

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An autonomous localisation and tracking method is a method independent from the reception of external data. In our approach we ignore methods like GPS- and WiFi- positioning and we focus on the use of inertial navigation system (INS) carried by the person and connected to a map database. The walking person is considered as a dynamic system, whose movements are measured by the INS. His trajectory is modified with respect to a dedicated motion model. Users location is estimated in the frame of Bayesian infere

The choice of a specific distribution for random parameters of discrete choice models is a critical issue in transportation analysis. Indeed, various pieces of research have demonstrated that an inappropriate choice of the distribution may lead to serious biases in model forecast and in the estimated means of random parameters. In this paper, we propose a practical test, based on seminonparametric techniques. The test is analyzed both on synthetic and real data, and is shown to be simple and powerful.

We consider a complex recyclable waste collection problem that extends the class of vehicle routing problems with intermediate facilities by integrating a heterogeneous fixed fleet and a flexible assignment of destination depots. Several additional side co ...

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 ...

The need for forecasting the direct and indirect effects of land use and transport policies on society, the environment, and the local economy has led to the development of integrated land use and transport (LUTI) models. The land use and transport policy ...

We propose a dynamic facial expression recognition framework based on discrete choice models (DCM). We model the choice of a person who has to label a video sequence representing a facial expression. The originality is based on the explicit modeling of causal effects between the facial features and the recognition of the expression. Three models are proposed. The first assumes that only the last frame of the video triggers the choice of the expression. The second model is composed of two parts. The first pa

Although the idea of vehicle sharing systems (VSSs) emerged back in 1940s, sustaining such a system became simpler with the improvements in technology in the past decade. In addition to that, people have become more concerned about environmental effects and try to find solutions on reducing emission and energy consumption. On the other hand, VSSs require effort to make them profitable. In this paper, we focus on the two of the operational level challenges, which are the demand forecasting and routing for th

The emergence of Intelligent Transportation Systems and the associated technologies has increased the need for complex models and algorithms. Namely, real-time information systems, directly influencing transportation demand, must be supported by detailed b ...

In the context of sales of new cars it is important to understand and model the consumers substitution patterns as well as their price elasticity towards different types of cars. To do so we develop (i) a multinomial logit model (MNL) and (ii) a cross-nested logit model (CNL) and compare the obtained results. The evolution of the market shares following an increase of the price of one of the alternatives is studied. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time that a cross-nested logit model is use

In this paper, we compare two methods to model the formation of choice sets in the context of discrete choice models. The first method is the probabilistic approach proposed by Manski (1977), who explicitly models the choice set generation process by expressing the choice as the joint probability of selecting a choice set and an alternative from this set. This approach is theoretically sound and unbiased, but it is hard to implement due to the complexity that arises from the combinatorial number of possible

This paper proposes a general methodology to model pedestrian destination choice from WiFi localization in multi-modal transport facilities, e.g., airports, railway stations. It is based on the output of Danalet et al. (2014) method to generate candidates of activity-episode sequences from WiFi measurements, locations of activities on a map and prior information. Destination choice is nested to the activity choice. An individual first chooses an activity, and then selects the destination where to perform it

We propose an extension of secant methods for nonlinear equations using a population of previous iterates. Contrarily to classical secant methods, where exact interpolation is used, we prefer a least squares approach to calibrate the linear model. We propo ...

Urban mobility services face the challenge of planning their operations efficiently while complying with user preferences. In this paper, we introduce a new mathematical model called a choice-driven dial-a-ride problem (CD-DARP) which is a generalization o ...

Travel time is a major component in understanding travel demand. However, the quantification of demand and forecasting hinges on understanding how travel time is perceived and reported. Travel time reporting is typically subject to errors and this paper fo ...

Moving walkways (MW) have been imagined as a possible means of transport since the late 19th century, and this system has fascinated urban planners and engineers ever since. Contrary to what has been imagined, moving walkways are only used in transportatio ...

We integrate latent attitudes of individuals into a mode choice model through latent variable and latent class models with the help of psychometric indicators that enable us to measure these attitudes. The aim of the inclusion of attitudes is to better understand the underlying choice preferences of travelers and therefore increase the forecasting power of the choice model. We first present an integrated choice and latent variable model where we include attitudes towards public transportation and environmen

The emergence of Big Data has enabled new research perspectives in the discrete choice community. While the techniques to estimate Machine Learning models on a massive amount of data are well established, these have not yet been fully explored for the esti ...

We consider the previously unsolved problem of sampling paths according to a given distribution from a general network. The problem is difficult because of the combinatorial number of alternatives, which prohibits a complete enumeration of all paths and he ...

A new approach for the estimation of bid-rent functions for location choice is proposed. The method considers that the expected maximum bid in the auction of a good is a latent variable than can be related to observed prices for similar goods. The model generates estimates for the spatial distribution of agents and prices simultaneously that are better than those obtained by estimating a maximum bid and a price model independently. The model is applied and validated for a case study. Results show that the p

In most applications related to transportation, it is of major importance to be able to identify the global optimum of the associated optimization problem. The work we present in this paper is motivated by the optimization problems arising in the maximum likelihood estimation of discrete choice models. Estimating those models becomes more and more problematic as several issues may occur in the estimation. We focus our interest on the non-concavity of the log-likelihood function which can present several (an

Michel Bierlaire

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Map-based Autonomous Personal Localization and Tracking

A practical test for the choice of mixing distribution in discrete choice models

Integrating a heterogeneous fixed fleet and a flexible assignment of destination depots in the waste collection VRP with intermediate facilities

Development of prototype UrbanSim models

Multidimensional Indicator Analysis for Transport Policy Evaluation

Dynamic facial expression recognition with a discrete choice model

Bike Sharing Systems: Does demand forecasting yield a better service?

A theoretical analysis of the cross-nested logit model

Uncovering substitution patterns in new car sales using a cross nested logit model

A comparative analysis of implicit and explicit methods to model choice set generation

Destination Choice Model including a panel effect using WiFi localization in a pedestrian facility

A multi-iterate method to solve systems of nonlinear equations

Choice-driven dial-a-ride problem for demand responsive mobility service

Mitigating the impact of errors in travel time reporting on mode choice modelling

An exploration of moving walkways as a transport system in urban centers

Attitudes towards mode choice in Switzerland

Estimation of discrete choice models with hybrid stochastic adaptive batch size algorithms

Metropolis-Hastings sampling of paths

Estimation of bid functions for location choice and price modeling with a latent variable approach

A heuristic for nonlinear global optimization relevant to discrete choice models estimation