At the end of January, Marcel Seger was given the opportunity to participate in a 5-day long methods training course on Discrete Choice Modelling, held at EPFL which is located in a scenic location overlooking the Swiss Alps. Based on academic merit, Marcel was fortunate to receive a partial scholarship (50% discount), allowing him to learn first-hand from the ‘godfathers’ of choice modelling, Prof Michel Bierlaire (EPFL) and Prof Moshe Ben-Akiva (MIT). The course covered an extensive range of topics, ranging from the fundamentals of micro-economic principles of utility-maximising theory, to probit- and logit modelling, all the way to mixed-logit and hybrid choice modelling. Participants convened from all across Europe and even the US, consisting of PhD students, industry practitioners and senior academics.
Going forward, Marcel is planning to use discrete choice modelling for his third DPhil paper to assess EV users’ propensities to adopt various charging strategies in a workplace charging setting, with digital skills, different levels of trust and agency as latent variables. Marcel will be spending some time at EPFL during April-May 2025 to dive into the topic more extensively, with generous methodological support from the Transport and Mobility Laboratory Lab (TRANS-OR) at EPFL.
Find out more about the course, delivered by the TRANS-OR group at EPFL, here.
Photo credits: Prof Michel Bierlaire
