Professor Corman is Chair of Transport Systems (Assistant Professor) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich. His main research interests are in the application of quantitative methods, analytics and operations research to transport sciences, especially the operational perspective of public transport, railways and logistics. Professor Corman received a PhD in Transport Sciences from TU Delft, the Netherlands in 2010 where his research focused on operations research techniques for realtime railway traffic control. His career combines industrial experience at IBM with academic experience from KU Leuven in Belgium and TU Delft as a research associate in transportation and logistics. In total he has published more than 100 peer reviewed journal and conference papers since 2007.
A major problem of public transport, and railways in particular, is to improve quality of operations by updating an offline timetable to the ever changing delays situation, in order to improve performance of the transport system. In railway systems, this relates to reduce train delays by reordering retiming or rerouting trains, and/or change connection plans and route advised to passengers, to improve their travel time.
Key point of research is the interaction between the problem (of the infrastructure manager) to reschedule trains and the problem (of the travellers) to find the optimal route in the network. In fact, changing passenger flows, respectively delaying trains and/or dropping passenger connections, varies the setting under which the two decision makers respectively interact. The interaction of the two decisions makers is mediated by the information one decision maker has about the other, and the service which is offered/used. We report different methods to address this dilemma, by agent based simulations, by game-theoretical approaches, and by estimating models of human behavior based on observed actions.