Laurie Garrow (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Join NCTSPM for this Transportation Speaker Series event, featuring Dr. Laurie A. Garrow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Garrow will be speaking on the topic of "Estimation of Airline Itinerary Choice Models Using Disaggregate Ticket Data".

Airline itinerary choice models support many multi-million dollar decisions, e.g., they are used to evaluate potential route schedules. Classic models suffer from major limitations, most notably they use average fare information but to not correct for price endogeneity.   We use a novel database of airline tickets to estimate itinerary choice models using detailed fare data and compare these to classic itinerary choice models that use aggregate fare information but correct for price endogeneity.  In order to estimate these large itinerary choice models, we developed a new freeware program, called Larch.  Benchmarking experiments against Stata and Biogeme showed that the size of the input estimation files are 50 to 100 times larger in Stata and Biogeme, respectively. Estimation times are also much faster in Larch; e.g., for a small itinerary choice problem, a multinomial logit model estimated in Larch converged in less than one second whereas the same model took almost 15 seconds in Stata and more than three minutes in Biogeme. For more complex discrete choice models, such as the ordered generalized extreme value model, estimation times were two seconds in Larch and four to five days in Biogeme.

Dr. Laurie Garrow is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Dr. Garrow is a leading expert in the modeling of air traveler behavior, especially as it pertains to the prediction of travel demand. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Northwestern University. Her dissertation was recognized with awards from INFORMS and IATBR. She has received multiple national awards for research including the prestigious ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Award, and a NSF CAREER award. She currently serves as President of AGIFORS and has served as President of the Transportation Science & Logistics Society of INFORMS.  You can learn more about Dr. Garrow’s work on this project online at  https://vimeo.com/arccorp/review/179763855/84e0ac4e82.