Postdoctoral researcher - railway traffic management (18-month position)

INSTITUT DE RECHERCHE TECHNOLOGIQUE (IRT) RAILENIUM

Employer

As a test and applied research centre in the railway sector, the IRT Railenium (http://railenium.eu/fr/) aims to develop, through collaborative innovation, the competitiveness of companies as engines of growth and jobs. Railenium implements innovation partnerships between manufacturers (in the broad sense: infrastructure managers, operators, builders and engineers) and academia to ensure a high-level response to the challenges of the railway sector. Based in the Hauts-de-France region, supported by the State and the railway sector, and acting in synergy with the i-Trans competitiveness cluster on land transport, the IRT is backed by a network of excellence centres and research laboratories.
Through the SmartRaCon consortium, composed with the German Research Centre DLR (leader of the consortium), the Spanish Technology Centre CEIT and the British Company NSL, Railenium is an Associate Member on Innovation Programme (IP) 2 (Advanced Traffic Management and Control Systems) of the Joint Undertaking Shift2Rail.
SmartRaCon is the only partner coming from academia.

Position and assignments

This 18-month position is part of the X2Rail-4 projects and will be held by Railenium for a work with University Gustave Eiffel laboratories. In this project, WP8 deals with real-time railway traffic management in case of perturbation.
Railenium?s contributions concern the proposal of an optimization algorithm to manage traffic on very large networks.

Start  : As soon as possible
Annual gross salary : ~ 35 k?/an

Geographic mobility: European

Profile

Knowledge

• PhD in operations research, computer science, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics or equivalent
• Optimization
• Statistical methods
• C++ development
• Fluent in English

Know-how

• Sense of initiative, Autonomy / teamwork
• Excellent relationship
• Creativity, rigor, organization
• Self-training capacity
• Synthesis, reactivity
• Availability (travel required)
• Writing skills

Goals

Work description:

• Design and development of optimization algorithms for the solution of the real-time railway traffic management problem on very large networks
• Participation in various coordination meetings;
• Possible participation to project meetings with all European partners;
• Production of deliverables and scientific publications.

Detailed missions:

• Design algorithms capable of coordinating the somehow independent optimization of traffic in local areas;
• Implement the design algorithms in C++ with interface to CPLEX;
• Organize data made available from partners of the project;
• Run experiments for assessing the performance of the proposed algorithms;
• Analyse the results using statistic tools to establish the best algorithm;
• Simulate the results on a railway microscopic simulator (OpenTrack)

Contact persons:

Paola Pellegrini, tel. : +33 (0)3.20.43.84.04, e-mail : paola.pellegrini@univ-eiffel.fr

Joaquin Rodriguez, tel. : +33 (0)3.20.43.83.32, e-mail : joaquin.rodriguez@univ-eiffel.fr

Application procedure :

Via email:

- detailed CV (education, work experience, internships, research projects carried out, publications)

- copy of the most relevant publications

- motivation letter explaining how the candidate's CV fits the position requirements and indicating the possible links of the publications chosen with the job description

- one or more recommendation letters