XCARCITY will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team of 8 PhD candidates, 2 postdocs, a programmer and researchers from TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, University of Twente and TNO. They will be supervised by several experienced researchers and work in close collaboration with public and/or private partners. An overview of the team can be found below. Or have a look at the positions that are still vacant!

Mohammad Jafari (TU Delft)
Work package 1 – Unravelling Flows
Mohammed has a Bachelor’s degree in Railway Transportation Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology and a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tehran. His academic background emphasizes mathematical modeling and optimization, specifically in facility location and transportation network design.

Yuxing Cheng
(TU Delft)
Work package 1 – Unravelling Flows
Yuxing is contributing to WP1 in ‘sensor network design for real-time smart mobility applications’. He is excited to join the team and use his research interests in data science, transport networks, and urban mobility systems. He completed his master’s degree in transport and planning at the TU Delft in August 2023, with the thesis “Explainable AI in metro network delay prediction”. The topic of the XCARCITY project fascinates him, especially given his passion for the interdisciplinary nature of transportation. He believes that the most innovative solutions emerge when minds from diverse backgrounds come together.

Alex Roocroft (TU Delft)
Work packages 1 – Unravelling Flows & 5 – Smart Infrastructure
Alex is a post-doctoral researcher in the Transport & Planning department of TU Delft. He is involved in WP1 and WP5 of the XCARCITY project. Prior to joining TU Delft, he obtained an MEng in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London and a PhD from University of Sheffield. His PhD research focused on data-driven traffic assignment models for strategic national road systems. During his PhD I worked at the ASTAR research agency in Singapore. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked as an engineering consultant in London and Dubai.

Dennis Andreoli
(TU/e)
Work package 2 – User Behaviour, Preferences & Acceptance
Dennis is pursuing a Ph.D. on ‘Safe and Improved Cycling’ as part of the second work package. He obtained his M.Sc. degree in Architecture, Building, and Planning with a specialization in Urban Systems and Real Estate in August 2023, following the acquisition of his B.Sc. degree in Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Sciences in August 2020 at Eindhoven University of Technology. His graduation thesis, titled “Driver Compliance with In-Vehicle Smart Parking System Advice”, examined the impact of smart parking advice on driver parking behavior.

Andrea Dominguez Gamez (TU/e)
Work package 2 – User Behaviour, Preferences & Acceptance
With a M. Sc. degree in civil engineering, emphasized on transport, Andrea is a great addition to the team. Having knowledge in data analysis and modeling, as a PhD student she now will be working on crowdsourced delivery within work package 2. Previously, she gained experience as a traffic engineer in smart traffic light systems and as consultant in transport and mobility. Her skill set contains policy advice, choice modeling, GIS analysis and working with public entities. She is driven by the impact XCARCITY can have on society.

Nourhan Shokry
(TU Delft)
Work package 3 – Integrated Smart Mobility Strategies
Nourhan is a PhD student at the TU Delft. Her primary focus is on contributing to the development of smart mobility strategies for areas with limited car access. Prior to her doctoral studies, she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering in 2018, followed by a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering in 2022. Concurrent with her master’s studies, she worked as a research assistant, collaborating on projects related to residential energy management in smart grids. Her contributions to these projects involved proposing enhanced and robust solutions for the load management problem, incorporating precise and heuristic-based methods.

Jyotsna Singh
(TU Delft)
Work package 4 – Integrated Transport Networks
Jyotsna PhD’s research will be based on developing an integrated transport network which links future low car areas with the existing transport infrastructure in the Netherlands. The research will focus on developing a generic multimodal multi-criteria optimisation model which could deal with both node and link based networks, including uncertainties, and testing the framework using the Urban Strategy – Impact Assessment Model. She did her Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering from India, and her Masters in Transport Infrastructure and Logistics at the TU Delft.

Dingshan Sun
(TU Delft)
Work package 5 – Smart Infrastructure
Dingshan is a postdoc in the department of Tranpost & Planning. He obtained his PhD degree from Delft Center for Systems and Control (TU Delft, in October, 2023) with the thesis titled “Multi-Level and Learning-Based Model Predictive Control for Traffic Management”. He is deeply impressed with and fascinated by this promising and ambitious project, which represents the solution for future urban mobility that can be beneficial for the entire world.

Fatemeh Marzani
(University of Twente)
Work package 5 – Smart Infrastructure
Fatemeh earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Engineering at the University of Tehran. In the XCARCITY project, she and her colleagues are part of WP5, where they’re working on finding ways to constantly update and refine our understanding of city life using wireless sensors and various other detection systems. The exciting part is that they’re particularly focused on tracking people’s movements, like pedestrians and cyclists, all while making sure their privacy is being guaranteed.

Soheil Dehghani
(University of Twente)
Work package 5 – Smart Infrastructure
Soheil earned his master’s degree in communications from the University of Tabriz, with a special focus on machine-to-machine communications. Later, as a researcher at TU Ilmenau, he gained extensive experience in vehicular communications and autonomous driving technologies. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente, working on WP5 of the XCARCITY project. His work focuses on large-scale, privacy-preserving mobility data collection and aggregation, aiming to design and evaluate efficient wireless data collection techniques that protect user privacy while enabling accurate crowd counting and flow estimation.
More information about the work packages can be found here.
The researchers

From left to right: Dingshan Sun, Mohammed Jafari, Azarakhsh Salem, Yuxing Cheng, Jyotsna Singh, Dennis Andreoli, Nourhan Shokry, Jingjun Li, Andrea Dominguez Gamez
The PCT

From left to right: Max Schreuder, Bart van Arem, Lobke Zandstra, Carla Robb and Maaike Snelder