Dr. Bilge Atasoy has been with the ITS Lab since December 2013. Prior to joining MIT, Bilge obtained her PhD from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she worked with Professor Michel Bierlaire in the TRANSP-OR Laboratory. She received her BSc. and MSc. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey. Her main research interests are transportation planning problems, application of operations research techniques in various areas, particularly transportation, and the integration of discrete choice models and optimization problems

Bilge was the project manager for the sponsored research project with Fujitsu Laboratories in which we developed an innovative Flexible Mobility on Demand (FMOD) transportation system. She worked on the real-time optimization framework in which passengers are offered an optimized assortment of travel options upon their request that is based on a choice model. Bilge also developed optimization models that take into account future demand estimation while optimizing the system for the received requests.

Her recent work on FMOD has been accepted in the Journal of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. Bilge presented this work at the International Paratransit Conference in October 2014, the INFORMS Annual Meeting in November 2014, and the TRB Annual Meeting in January 2015.

Additionally, Bilge is the project manager for our project entitled ‘Real-time Optimization on Managed Lanes Based on Prediction of Demand and Traffic Conditions’, which is sponsored by Ferrovial S.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative. In addition to her research, Bilge is highly active in teaching. She is a teaching fellow for 1.202 Demand Modeling and head lab instructor for 14.61s Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Demand and Market Shares.