Rafal Kucharski Lab

Assistant Professor, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

me.png

I research complex social systems: urban mobility. Congested, urban multimodal networks used by millions of agents to reach their destinations and leaving huge sets of mobility traces ready to be applied for modelling, optimization, understanding and control. Full CV

Currently, I run the ERC Starting Grant COeXISTENCE where I bridge between ML and transportation - we simulate how intelligent machines compete with humans for limited urban resources (space) and what can we expect. See details here I am Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) with the Group of Machine Learning Research GMUM. I run the NCN Opus Grant on Shared Mobility in the pandemic times, ERC StG and Horizon Europe projects.

Before, I worked (2019-2021) with prof. Oded Cats at TU Delft in his ERC Starting Grant Critical MaaS. I modelled two-sided mobility platforms, specifcally focusing on ride-pooling (ExMAS) and agent-based simulator for Uber-like systems (MaaSSim). I did PhD at Cracow University of Technology with an excellent goup of prof. Andrzej Szarata and working closely with Guido Gentile from La Sapienza on non-equilibrium dynamic traffic assignment. In the interdisciplinary field of urban mobility I did research which can be classified as:

  • model estimation, optimization, system control, network design;
  • agent-based simulation, game-theory, network science, stochastic simulation, epidemic modelling;
  • machine learning, spatial analysis, big data analysis, pattern recognition, unsupervised learning;
  • behavioural modelling, economic discrete choice models, policy, sustainability.

drawing         drawing         drawing      drawing      drawingdrawing


Teaching materials

I run the seminar on Complex Social Systems (transport is one of them) at Jagiellonian University - materials and papers are on my github


news

Dec 12, 2023 Such a wonderful evening at #Krakow’s Kazimierz. Not only a Christmas Party, but also the first time when the complete team of #ERC #COeXISTENCE had a chance to meet and integrate with themselves as well as with ‘older’ friends. 👐 Ten brilliant minds, working now at Jagiellonian University to contribute towards future urban mobility. Great pride of you, wish all the best in the coming year!
Dec 11, 2023 🗞 When ride-pooling is attractive/efficient for all the parties involved (passengers, platforms/providers, city/environment/sustainability)? We examined half a year (1.5 million trip sample) from NYC, run 9 000 experiments with our 𝐄𝐱𝐌𝐀𝐒 and report 6 KPIs to move beyond the well-known 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐬 and better understand ride-pooling potential. See our results in 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲: https://lnkd.in/dW5hBvhC or: https://lnkd.in/dGWVbjGN with Olha Shulika Michał Bujak and Farnoud Ghasemi
Sep 9, 2023 Today I gave a keynote speech at the TSTP Conference - I gave an overview of future equilibira with CAVs - slides
Sep 5, 2023 🛫 On our way to hEART Conference at ETH. This year, our team will present in Zurich: 💣 Farnoud Ghasemi will show how we extend #MaaSSim and simulate Dynamics of the Ride-Sourcing Market: A Coevolutionary Model of Competition between Two-Sided Mobility Platforms - session D6 on Thursday. 💣 Michał Bujak will show how we extend #ExMAS to be able to: Assessing expected ride-pooling performance with non-deterministic, heterogeneous travellers’ behaviour - session E2 on Wednesday. 💣 Arkadiusz Drabicki wraps up his PhD to show his results on Willingness to wait with real-time crowding information in urban public transport – before vs. after COVID-19 pandemic (with Oded Cats ) - session A2 on Wednesday.
Aug 28, 2023 Happy to help the future ERC Grantees with a workshop Akademia ERC. Many excellent future candidates, fingers crossed, I hope I have helped
Jul 6, 2023 Great to kick-off the Horizon Europe SUM project. Unfortunately not in person in Lille, but hopefully soon as well. The consortium and objectives look great!

selected publications

  1. JoTG
    Spatiotemporal variability of ride-pooling potential – Half a year New York City experiment
    Shulika, Olha, Bujak, Michal, Ghasemi, Farnoud, and Kucharski, Rafal
    Journal of Transport Geography 2024
  2. PLOS
    Simulating two-sided mobility platforms with MaaSSim
    Kucharski, Rafał, and Cats, Oded
    PLoS ONE 2022
  3. CIiT
    Using city-bike stopovers to reveal spatial patterns of urban attractiveness
    Banet, Krystian, Naumov, Vitalii, and Kucharski, Rafał
    Current Issues in Tourism 2022
  4. SciRep
    Modelling virus spreading in ride-pooling networks
    Kucharski, Rafał, Cats, Oded, and Sienkiewicz, Julian
    Scientific Reports 2021
  5. TR:B
    Exact matching of attractive shared rides (ExMAS) for system-wide strategic evaluations
    Kucharski, Rafał, and Cats, Oded
    Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 2020
  6. TR:B
    Simulation of rerouting phenomena in Dynamic Traffic Assignment with the Information Comply Model
    Kucharski, Rafał, and Gentile, Guido
    Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 2019
  7. EJOR
    How to split the costs and charge the travellers sharing a ride? Aligning system’s optimum with users’ equilibrium
    Fielbaum, Andres, Kucharski, Rafał, Cats, Oded, and Alonso-Mora, Javier
    European Journal of Operational Research 2021