Q&A with Abdou Ait-Ali, VTI: Improving railway capacity allocation

At the UIC’s High-Speed Congress in March 2023, Global Railway Review interviewed Abderrahman (Abdou) Ait-Ali, Researcher at the Swedish Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI), to understand more about what capacity allocation is and why it is important in deregulated railways.

In this video interview, Abdou discusses the main challenges associated with capacity allocation, the importance of moving forward with AI and data analytics to deliver improved capacity allocation, and how cost-benefit analyses can help to improve railway operations.

Abdou holds an engineering diploma (in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics) from INP Grenoble Institute of Technology as well as a master’s degree (in Computer Science and Engineering) from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In November 2020, he got a PhD (in Infra-Informatics) from Linköping University. Abdou is currently sharing his time between Linköping University and the VTI. The focus of his research is mainly on transport economics, cost-benefit analysis, operations research, and mathematical optimisation. His works with applications to different transport and railway problems such as capacity allocation, demand estimation, scheduling, maintenance planning, and traffic information. Besides research, Abdou is also interested in linguistics, photography, and history and is contributing to different open-source projects such as Wikipedia.

Watch the video interview above or on the Global Railway Review YouTube channel link now.