About Dr. Bat-hen Nahmias-Biran
My research fields are transportation systems technologies and evaluation. I use the state of the art in behavioral models, simulation, and estimation tools to investigate the potential and impacts of innovations and policies on transportation systems.
My research experience in transportation systems technologies is mostly related to my research experience in MIT at Future Urban Mobility (FM) lab. The Lab is spearheading several projects on the planning, design, and operation of future passenger and freight systems. In particular, the Smartphone based Future Mobility Sensing (FMS) project has already achieved worldwide recognition for its implementation of a broad data collection effort using smartphones and GPS loggers matched with web-based tools to infer human activities in space and time, including mobility and location choices. I was studying the impact of this innovative data collection system on behavioral models estimation in Singapore and Tel-Aviv.
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Most of my work in that lab was devoted to the development of the integrated simulation platform SimMobility. The SimMobility project integrates and links together various mobility-sensitive behavioral models with state-of-the art simulators to predict impacts of mobility demands on transportation networks, services, and vehicular emissions and to evaluate future urban transportation scenarios. I was leading the SimMobility Mid-Term simulator development in this innovative project and intend to continue using it for Israel. SimMobility Mid-Term is an agent based, fully econometric, and activity-based demand model integrated with a dynamic traffic assignment model. In my work, I focused on the development of improved capabilities of the different advanced forms of mobility options such as mobility on-demand, automated mobility on-demand and Uber like services etc.
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Another project I was deeply involved in focused on the evaluation of autonomous vehicle (AV) policies and their land and transport implications, for the Ministry of Transport in Singapore. In this study we developed fetchers to accommodate AV’s in SimMobility. Specifically, we studied how shared autonomous vehicles (AVs) reduce the use and demand for private cars, increase public transport mode share, and support higher intensities of development. We examined how and what type of AV system to deploy to support such a scenario, and identified innovative urban designs integrating optimum AV deployments by examining the impact and associated trade-offs of different land use scenarios where mixed traffic was present. We also identified optimal charging station location for AVs in Singapore and estimated energy consumption of AVs at optimum deployments under various future scenarios.
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My research experience in transportation systems evaluation is mostly related to my doctoral thesis which dealt with incorporating equity considerations in transportation project evaluation and planning. This multidisciplinary research combines methodologies from the field of economics with features and deep knowledge of travel behavior, transport planning, and modelling. At the theoretical level, this work is the first to utilize Activity-Based Models’ advantages for equity analysis, and the first to suggest a practical way to use the Capability Approach in transportation project evaluation. At the practical level, the development of this research enabled better analysis of the impact of various transport investments and policies on different population groups, and these are tested by few synthetic case studies, and in a full scale, real world, case study. At the policy level it provides appropriate guidance to embed equity objectives into future transport policy and decision making processes, it consists an important contribution to the forming EU equity guidelines for the European commission.
My New Projects
SimMobilty for Tel-Aviv
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Future Mobility Lab
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