Rafal Kucharski Lab

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We study how people travel. We want to understand their travel demands and behaviour better. We want to see how they use novel mobility services (like ride-pooling or mobility platforms) and how we can design them to better fit the needs of: users, suppliers and sustainable cities. We want to forecast the future of urban mobility with connected autonomous vehicles. We use big empirical datasets, real-world networks, old and new algorithms and models. We simulate, model, analyze, solve problems, propose algorithms to better understand how cities of the future will work. See our works here. The group is led by Rafał Kucharski, associate professor at Group of Machine Learning Research, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Former PostDoc at TU Delft (prof. Oded Cats), PhD of prof. Guido Gentile (La Sapienza) and alumni of prof. Andrzej Szarata (Cracow University of Technology). In our research we do stuff 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.

Currently there is ten of us, working in three different projects, at the modern campus of one of the oldest universities in Europe (est. 1364), Jagiellonian University in KrakĂłw, Poland. We have three major projects:

  • ERC Starting Grant COeXISTENCE, where we simulate future of cities shared by humans and autonomous vehicles. We use reinforcement learning to optimize joint actions of collaborative machines (cars) and see how it affects the well studied complex social system of urban traffic - will it remain in the Nash Equilibrium? We do not think so, but that’s what we want to demonstrate - stay tuned.
  • Horizon Europe SUM project - where we apply our in-house ride-pooling algorithms to see the potential of on-demand transit in urban areas of Jerusalem and KrakĂłw.
  • NCN Opus - where we look at the future of ride-pooling and platform services in post-pandemic world.

Feel free to reach to us for a joint seminar, collaboration or vacancies.


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selected publications

  1. TB&S
    Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected travellers’ willingness to wait with real-time crowding information?
    Drabicki, Arkadiusz, Cats, Oded, and Kucharski, Rafał
    Travel Behaviour and Society 2025
  2. preprint
    Optimising network efficiency in the epidemic scenario
    Magdalena, Proszewska, Michal, Bujak, Rafal, Kucharski, Jacek, Tabor, and Marek, Smieja
    2024
  3. npj
    Hyper pooling private trips into high occupancy transit like attractive shared rides
    Kucharski, Rafał, and Cats, Oded
    npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport 2024
  4. Transportation
    Ride-pooling service assessment with heterogeneous travellers in non-deterministic setting
    Bujak, Michal, and Kucharski, Rafal
    Transportation 2024
  5. 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
  6. AAMAS
    Modelling the Rise and Fall of Two-sided Markets
    Ghasemi, Farnoud, and Kucharski, Rafal
    In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2024
  7. SNAM
    Network structures of urban ride-pooling problems and their properties
    Bujak, Michal, and Kucharski, Rafal
    Social Network Analysis and Mining 2023
  8. RTBM
    Should I stay or should I board? Willingness to wait with real-time crowding information in urban public transport
    Drabicki, Arkadiusz, Cats, Oded, Kucharski, Rafał, Fonzone, Achille, and Szarata, Andrzej
    Research in Transportation Business & Management 2023
  9. PLOS
    Simulating two-sided mobility platforms with MaaSSim
    Kucharski, Rafał, and Cats, Oded
    PLoS ONE 2022
  10. CIiT
    Using city-bike stopovers to reveal spatial patterns of urban attractiveness
    Banet, Krystian, Naumov, Vitalii, and Kucharski, Rafał
    Current Issues in Tourism 2022
  11. 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
  12. SciRep
    Modelling virus spreading in ride-pooling networks
    Kucharski, Rafał, Cats, Oded, and Sienkiewicz, Julian
    Scientific Reports 2021
  13. 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
  14. 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