Abderrahman Ait-Ali

About me

Abderrahman is currently working as a researcher at VTI - The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and LiU - Linköping University. His research focus is a combination of transport economics (socio-economic evaluations, cost-benefit analysis, life cycle costing) and mathematical optimisation (operations research, mathematical programming and optimisation). The research is mainly applied to transportation problems in public transport and railways such as capacity allocation and timetabling, maintenance planning and traffic information.

Abderrahman holds an engineering diploma (in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics) from Grenoble Institute of Techonology - INP (Ensimag) as well as a Masters degree (in Computer Science and Engineering) from KTH - Royal Institute of Technology. In November 2020, he obtained his PhD. degree (in Infra-Informatics) from Linköping University.

Besides research, Abdou is also interested in linguistics, photography, economics and history. He is contributing to different open source projects such as Wikimedia (Wikipedia and Wikidata).

For more details, see CV.

Journal papers

• Ait Ali, A., Odolinski , K., Pålsson , B., & Torstensson , P. (2024). Evaluating the mix of maintenance activities on railway crossings with respect to life-cycle costs. European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, 24(1), 1–29.

  Paper

• H-Nia, S., Krishna, V. V., Odolinski, K., Torstensson, P. T., Ait-Ali, A., Sundholm, L., Larsson Kråik, P.-O. & Stichel, S. 2023. Simulation-based evaluation of maintenance strategies from a life cycle cost perspective. Wear, 532-533, 205120.

  Paper

• Ait Ali, A., & Lidén, T. (2022). Minimal utilization rate for railway maintenance windows: a cost-benefit approach. European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, 22(2), 108–131.

  Paper

• Ait Ali, A., Eliasson, J., Warg, J., (2021), Are commuter train timetables consistent with passengers’ valuations of waiting times and in-vehicle crowding?, Transport Policy.

  Paper

• Ait Ali, A., Eliasson, J., (2021), The value of additional data for public transport origin–destination matrix estimation, Public Transport.

  Paper

• Ait Ali, A., Eliasson, J., (2021), European Railway Deregulation: An overview of market organization and capacity allocation, Transportmetrica A: Transport Science.

  Paper

• Ait Ali, A., Warg, J., Eliasson, J., (2020), Pricing commercial train path requests based on societal costs, Transportation Research Part A, 132, 452-464.

  Paper

  Preprint

• Ait Ali, A., Lindberg, P. O., Eliasson, J., Nilsson, J., Peterson, A., (2020), A disaggregate bundle method for train timetabling problems, Journal of Rail Transport Planning & Management.

  Paper

  Preprint

Working papers

• Ait-Ali, A., Lidén, T. (2021). Minimal utilization rates for railway maintenance windows: a cost-benefit approach. VTI Working Papers Series 2021:8. Presented at 2021 European Conference of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis, SCBA 2021, Stockholm.

  Paper

  Slides

• Ait-Ali, A., Eliasson, J., Warg, J. (2020). Are commuter train timetables consistent with passengers’ valuations of waiting times and in-vehicle crowding?. VTI Working Papers Series 2020:1. Presented at 2019 European Conference of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis, SCBA 2019, Toulouse.

  Paper

  Slides

• Ait-Ali, A., Eliasson, J. (2019). Railway capacity allocation: a survey of market organizations, allocation processes and track access charges. VTI Working Papers Series 2019:1.

  Paper

• Ait-Ali, A., Eliasson, J. (2019). Dynamic Origin-Destination Estimation Using Smart Card Data: An Entropy Maximisation Approach. arXiv:1909.02826. Presented at Rail Norrköping 2019.

  Paper

  Slides

Projects - Ongoing

• Priopunkt (Samhällsekonomisk prioritering av underhållsåtgärder för ökad punktlighet), or Socio-Economic Prioritization of Maintenance Actions for Improved Punctuality (2024-2026). Priopunkt is funded by Trafikverket and aims to develop a socio-economically based valuation of events and disruptions in the railway system.
• RURUT or resource-efficient maintenance and renewal strategies via look-up tables (2024-2027). RURUT is funded by Vinnova (InfaSweden) and aims to study how look-up tables can be used identify and prioritise maintenance and renewal activities based on their economic efficiency, including environmental effects and other external costs.
• ResPunkt (2024-2025) A Pre-study, funded by K2 research center, exploring measures to monitor passenger-centric punctuality in public transport.

Projects - Completed

• VTT (2022-2024) Research project, funded by Trafikverket, about value of traffic information to passengers during train traffic disruptions, a socio-economic study.

  Final report (in Swedish)

• Mistra InfraMaint (2022-2023) Models for more effective strategies for maintenance of switches & crossings and for rail grinding.
• IMPACT-2 (2021-2022) Work package WP4 on quantitative KPI-Tree and SPD integrated assessment, funded by the EU as part of Shift2Rail.
• FR8RAIL III (2020-2021) Work package WP2 on Real-Time Network Management), funded by the EU as part of Shift2Rail.
• SamEff doctoral project (Samhällsekonomiskt Effektiv fördelning av järnvägskapacitet, 2015-2020) or Socio-economically efficient railway capacity allocation, funded by Trafikverket.

Presentations

• Estimering av dynamiska origin-destination matriser baserat på entropimaximering. Transportforum 2021.

  Slides

• Samhällsekonomisk analys av pendeltågens frekvensk: operatörens värdering av väntetid och trängsel. Transportforum 2020.

  Slides

Teaching

• Optimization and Statistics in Transportation The course provides basic insight in optimization, especially optimization of linear, nonlinear and integer problems with applications in transportation.
• Public transportation and rail traffic The course provides basic knowledge of public transport systems and rail transport. The focus is on tactical planning of public transport.

Supervision

• Passengers’ Punctuality in Railways: A comparison of passenger-centric measures of punctuality in rail networks Passenger - Master thesis.
• Public transport usage analysis based on ticket data - Master thesis.

Other publications

• Ait Ali, A. (2020). Methods for Capacity Allocation in Deregulated Railway Markets. Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertation No. 2101.

  Kappa

  Thesis

  Slides

  Video

• Warg, J., Ait-Ali, A., Eliasson, J. (2019). Assessment of Commuter Train Timetables Including Transfers. Presented at the 21th EURO Working Group on Transportation Meeting, EWGT 2018, Braunschweig.

  Paper

  Slides

• Sedrati, A., Ait-Ali, A. (2019). Moroccan Darija in Online Creation Communities: Example of Wikipedia. Al-Andalus Magreb, 26, 11.1-14.

  Paper

  Slides

• Ait-Ali, A., Eliasson, J., Warg, J. (2017). Measuring the Socio-economic Benefits of Train Timetables Application to Commuter Train Services in Stockholm. Presented at the 20th EURO Working Group on Transportation Meeting, EWGT 2017, Budapest.

  Paper

  Slides

• Ait-Ali, A., Sedrati, A. (2016). Towards Internet Domain Names in Tifinagh. Presented at TICAM Conference 2016, Rabat.

  Paper

  Slides

• Ait Ali, A. (2015). Integration of Production Scheduling and Energy Management: Software Development. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

  Thesis

Media

• Global Railway Review - Q&A with Abdou Ait-Ali, VTI: Improving railway capacity allocation.

  Article

  Video

• LiU News - How to efficiently allocate railway capacity.

  English

  Swedish

Contacts

• Emails: Personal - VTI - LiU
• Google Scholar - ResearchGate
• Linkedin - Github
• Medium - Twitter - Facebook