Prof. Dr. Engr. Ansar-Ul-Haque Yasar finished his Bachelors of Computer Software Engineering degree from Pakistan & Masters in Computer Science and Engineering degree at Linkoping Sweden (specializing in Communication and Interactivity). In 2007, he joined the DistriNet research group at the Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and started his PhD research on context-based communication in large scale vehicular networks funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). After finishing his PhD (in Engineering), he worked as a senior researcher / a professor at the Transportation Research Institute (IMOB) – Hasselt University Belgium since October 2011. At IMOB, one of his main projects is the European FP7 project DATA science for SIMulating the era of electric vehicles (DATA SIM) (2011 - 2014). Furthermore, as part of his current job includes international collaborations, projects and business development at IMOB. He is also responsible for the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) course for the masters of transportation sciences students at the university. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, context-aware communication, VANETs, intelligent transport systems and mobility management. He has authored several high-level research articles in renowned international journals, conferences, books and workshops.
While some may argue that the added value of one research domain is more limited in terms of added economic value than the other, the contribution of transportation research towards the society as a whole is significant. According to several predictions, the transport sector will overtake industry as the largest energy user by 2020. Unfortunately, the sector has major negative economic, social and environmental side effects. The complexity of today’s policy decision making has motivated several international research teams to develop policy frameworks which are finally aimed at mitigating these negative externalities of transport.
In several international policy frameworks, conventional transport models have been used for the quantification of these externalities. When an operational model is required to provide quantitative predictions about human behavior, some kind of mathematical apparatus is adopted in models. In this talk, we will cover the research domain of activity-based models. In these models, using micro-simulation, full activity-travel patterns of people are predicted in a high resolution of time and space, offering a wealth of information for policy making. The models give us a behavioral insight at an unprecedented level and allow for many interesting interdisciplinary applications. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the state-of-the-art in activity-based modeling and discuss the interesting developments in this field of research. In addition to applications in the domain of transportation research, I will focus on scientific interdisciplinary applications with several other scientific fields, such as emission and health impact calculations, traffic safety and future electric vehicle (market) projections. Also the talk will cover novel interesting trends in the research field such as the increasing availability of big data and the development of modern survey technology, which offers several opportunities for policy makers but also provides researchers with novel challenges and problems.