New position open at the Chair of Infrastructure Management!
The Chair of Infrastructure Management lead by Professor Dr. Bryan T. Adey in the Institute of Construction and Infrastructure Management of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering has an opening for a PhD student in the field of model-based planning support for transport and urban systems under uncertainty.
PHD Position in Planning Transport Systems under Uncertain Futures through Agent-Based Simulations and Reinforcement learning
Planning transport and urban systems is inherently complex: interventions last for decades, have widespread impacts, require considerable investment, and must remain functional under highly uncertain future conditions. High-resolution agent-based models are well suited to study the complexities of transport and urban systems by including detailed dynamics (e.g. competing and emerging transport modes) and by providing disaggregated insights (e.g. across sociodemographic groups). However, the consideration of uncertainty (both in the model and in the future conditions) in such detailed transport models is uncommon due to the high number of parameters involved and the required computational time.
The new ETH Mobility Initiative project, Future Uncertainty in Transportation and Urban systems for Enhanced Strategic planning (FUTURES), will enable the exploration and planning under uncertainty through high-resolution agent-based transport models, beyond the usual single-prediction approach, towards a wide range of potential future scenarios. Specifically, we will use spatially explicit surrogate models, which can accurately approximate the complex outputs of computationally expensive transport simulations in a fraction of the time. This leap in computational efficiency will unlock the ability to simulate and analyse thousands of potential scenarios and interventions, helping planners identify adaptive plans that can respond to changing conditions over the coming decades (e.g. when and where to expand rail, road or cycling infrastructure).
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