Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

MoCA Lab

Mobility Computation & Analytics Laboratory

We study how people, platforms, and policies interact in mobility systems,
building models and tools for efficient, fair, and human-centered transportation.

Research areas

Behavioral foundations

Choice modeling

We study how travelers and platforms make decisions, modeling preferences, constraints, and rich patterns of substitution and heterogeneity in a way that is flexible, scalable, and consistent with real-world behavior.

Mobility systems

Equilibrium & Learning

We study sequential decision-making, repeated interactions, and adaptive behaviors to understand how behavior evolves over time, and how system-level behaviors emerge when many agents interact.

Information & AI

Platform-mediated mobility

We study how digital platforms, information, guidance, and AI assistants influence mobility choices and system outcomes, and how human and algorithmic decision-makers coexist in mobility networks.

Our Projects

Open

Seeking: Graduate students (PhD/MSc)

Privacy-preserving mobility choice modeling

Mobility data is powerful, but it is also sensitive. Cities and platforms increasingly want to learn how people travel while protecting privacy. This project will develop methods that allow us to obtain meaningful behavioral insights via structural spatiotemporal choice models, meanwhile ensuring privacies are protected.

Open

Seeking: Graduate students (PhD/MSc)

Designing information in mobility systems

When many travelers respond to the same guidance (e.g., route recommendations), the outcome is not simply everyone gets faster routes. Their responses interact through congestion in mobility systems. This project develops system-level models and algorithms for information design: how agencies or platforms should structure guidance so that the whole network performs better, not just individual trips.

Open

Seeking: Research assistants / Master students

Privacy-preserving data and experimentation platform

Many important mobility questions cannot be answered without careful data collection and controlled experiments. This project develops a privacy-preserving platform that supports safe mobility data collection and, later, controlled studies of information interventions.

Ongoing

Information and choice: how pushed information changes decisions

Navigation apps and platforms do not just show information. They increasingly push recommendations and alerts, sometimes simple, sometimes personalized. This project studies how such information ultimately change how people choose where, when, and how to travel.

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News

November 25, 2025

Paper accepted to ISTTT 26

Our latest work on modeling strategic interactions in MaaS systems as a multi-leader-multi-follower game has been accepted to 26th International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT26). See you in Munich in 2026!

October 25, 2025

Presentations at the INFORMS annual meeting 2025

We presented our works on MaaS modeling and integrated electrified logistics and power systems at the INFORMS annual meeting 2025.

October 2025

Research visits to GTIIT, SYSU, and HK PolyU

We had a great time visiting Technion’s sister compus, GTIIT, in Guangdong, China. Prof. Yao also visited SYSU and HK PolyU to deliver a seminar on perturbed utility Makovian choice models and discuss research collaborations.

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