Bio

Leila Hajibabai earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 2014 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also received an M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering. She previously earned an M.Sc. in Civil Engineering in 2006 from Tehran University and a B.S. in Civil Engineering in 2004 from K.N. Toosi University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

Before joining NC State, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, following her tenure as a faculty member at Washington State University.

Hajibabai is an active member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and has made significant contributions to the professional activities of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. She is involved with the Transportation Network Modeling Standing Committee, the Emerging Technologies in Network Modeling Subcommittee, and the Standing Committee on Maintenance Equipment. She also serves as a co-chair of the Operations and Preservation Group within the TRB Young Members Council and actively participates in the Transportation Science and Logistics Section of INFORMS. She is also a member of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).

Area(s) of Expertise

Leila Hajibabai’s research lies in the areas of systems analytics and optimization, and supply chain logistics. Her main emphasis is on sustainable transportation systems: electrification and automation, renewable energy powered mobility services, and transportation asset management. Her group uses operations research to improve the design, performance, and maintenance of such complex infrastructure systems. Her objective is to offer methodologies that address the socio-technological needs of smart and resilient cities and communities. Both theory and applications are emphasized in her group to evaluate the trade-offs on solution quality, computational efficiency, and applicability to large-scale problems in strategic, tactical, and operational levels.

Publications

• Anticipatory Monte Carlo tree search–based optimization for stochastic dynamic routing with time windows , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2026)
• Incentive-Based Simulation-Optimization Framework for Rebalancing Micromobility Systems , Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board (2026)
• A Heuristic for Battery-Constrained Charging and Rebalancing of Micromobility Devices , Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board (2025)
• Integrated column generation for volunteer-based delivery assignment and route optimization , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2025)
• Real‐time network‐level traffic signal and trajectory optimization with connected automated and human‐driven vehicles , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2025)
• A Lagrangian relaxation approach for resource allocation problem with capacity constraints , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2024)
• A planar graph cluster‐routing approach for optimizing medical waste collection based on spatial constraint , Transactions in GIS (2024)
• A relaxation‐based Voronoi diagram approach for equitable resource distribution , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2024)
• Advancing the white phase mobile traffic control paradigm to consider pedestrians , Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (2024)
• Charging Network Design and Service Pricing for Electric Vehicles With User-Equilibrium Decisions , IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2023)

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