Michel Bierlaire

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 (EPFL) and directs the university’s Transport and Mobility Laboratory.^[2]

Michel Bierlaire
Bierlaire in 2020
Born	(1967-02-09) February 9, 1967 (age 58)[1] Namur, Belgium
Citizenship	Belgium; Switzerland[1]
Known for	Discrete-choice modelling; DynaMIT; Biogeme
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Namur
Thesis	Mathematical models for transportation demand analysis (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Philippe Toint
Academic work
Discipline	Applied mathematics; transport modelling
Institutions	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Doctoral students	Carolina Osorio
Website	https://www.epfl.ch/labs/transp-or/

Education

Bierlaire studied mathematics at the University of Namur, obtaining his PhD in 1996 for research on transportation-demand models supervised by Philippe Toint.^[1]

Career

From 1995 to 1998 he was a research associate in the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he co-developed DynaMIT, a real-time traffic-prediction tool.^[3] Bierlaire joined EPFL in 1998 as a senior scientist, became Associate Professor in 2006 and Full Professor in 2012.^[1] He founded the Transport and Mobility Laboratory in 2006^[2] and directed EPFL’s Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2009 to 2017.^[1] In 2012 he co-founded the European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART) and served as its first president until 2015.^[4]

Research

Bierlaire combines discrete-choice theory, operations research and simulation to analyse travel behaviour, design transport policies and evaluate environmental impacts.^[1] 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.^[5] Bierlaire created several massive open online courses, including “Introduction to Discrete Choice Models” on edX,^[6] and co-teaches the professional course “Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Individual Behaviour and Market Demand” with colleagues from MIT and UC Berkeley.^[7]

Honours and service

• Founding Editor-in-Chief, EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics (2011–2019)^[8]
• Associate Editor, Operations Research (since 2012)^[1]

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.