Biography


Dr. Yongqiu Zhu is an Assistant Professor of multimodal transport network resilience at the Department of Transport and Planning. She addresses the challenges of uncertainty and scalability in (real-time) user-centric decision-making problems within passenger transport systems, leveraging reinforcement learning, data-driven approaches, optimization, simulation and heuristics. A particular focus is on public transport and its coordination with other emerging urban mobility, to withstand, respond, and adapt to the (unexpected) abnormal operational situations, including traffic disturbances, overcrowding, and disruptions.

In 2012, she earned her Master degree in in Traffic Transportation Planning and Management from Southwest Jiaotong University in China. Following a few months of visiting research at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she began her PhD study in 2016 at the Department of Transport and Planning at TU Delft. In December 2019, she successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled "Passenger-Oriented Timetable Rescheduling in Railway Disruption Management ",  which was under the supervision of Prof. Rob M.P. Goverde. After completing her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft and TU Denmark, respectively. In these positions, she conducted research in new directions, focusing on resilient railways in extreme weather conditions (with NS and ProRail), reinforcement learning for real-time traffic management, and multimodal transportation. In December 2020, she was awarded the prestigious ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship, supporting her exploration of the potential of AI techniques in passenger-oriented traffic management and smart information provision. She conducted this research under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Corman at ETH Zurich in Switzerland from 2021 to 2023.

Yongqiu’s scientific contributions have received several awards, including the Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis (ICROMA) in 2019 and 2021, the Young Operations Research Awards from the International Association of Railway Operations Research (IAROR) in 2019 and 2021, and the Best Presentation Award from the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in 2020.

Read more