CEE Seminar: From Open Data to Transportation Studies – An Open Source Approach

Abstract: In the last decade, the number of available transportation solutions and the number of promised new ones constantly increases. Moreover, the variety of datasets used to examine, plan and forecast travel behavior is growing. With the overwhelming and sudden transportation changes and abundance of available data, it feels like planners were caught off guard, both from research and policy perspectives.

This talk provides an overview of the tools and methodologies, developed and used at ETH, aimed at solving some of the challenges that transportation planning faces today. The open-source and reproducible process from raw data to case studies of current and future mobility solutions will be presented. This process utilizes large datasets, discrete-choice models and agent-based simulation approaches to analyze large-scale scenarios with a high level of detail.

Bio: Miloš Balać received his doctorate from ETHZ at the Institute for Transport Planning in 2019. His dissertation topic was "Emerging Mobility Solutions and their Impacts in Zurich, Switzerland," with a focus on carsharing and urban air mobility. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at ETHZ. His current research focuses on modelling emergent mobility solutions, optimization of transportation systems, population synthesis as a foundation for agent-based simulations, and providing open-source tools to foster reproducible research.