Zhengbing He (贺正冰)

I am a passionate researcher who focuses on and enjoys research
Research Scientist @ Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States
Adjunct Professor @ Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, United States
Google Scholar, GitHub, ORCID: 0000-0001-5716-3853 Email: he dot zb at hotmail dot com

Prior to joining MIT, I was a tenured full professor at Beijing University of Technology, China. As a principal investigator, I have secured funding exceeding $1 million for national-level (key) projects. I have published over 160 academic papers, including 40+ papers exclusively in the prestigious journal series of Transportation Research and IEEE Transactions, with total citations >6500, i10-index >80 and H-index =39. Annual citations from 2017 to 2024 continue increasing: 85-229-413-691-740-1034-1132-1440

I am an IEEE senior member and was listed as World’s Top 2% Scientists (Ranking 147 in Transportation & Logistics). I serve as a Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, a Deputy Editor in Chief for IET Intelligent Transport Systems, an Assoicate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, a Handling Editor for Transportation Research Records, an Editorial Advisory Board member for Transportation Research Part C, etc.
Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection of urban mobility, systems engineering, and artificial intelligence, spanning from traditional topics such as traffic flow operations and control, sustainability, and resilience to emerging areas including data-driving modeling, autonomous driving, and generative AI — all made possible by (1) long-term dedicated research, (2) broad intellectual curiosity, and (3) deep interdisciplinary collaboration.
Academic Service
Journal of Transportation Engineering and Information (in Chinese), Editor-in-Chief
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Senior Editor
IET Intelligent Transport Systems, Deputy Editor-in-Chief
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, Associate Editor
Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Editorial Advisory Board member
Transportation Research Record, Handling Editor
International Journal of Crowd Science, Associate Editor
Chair, SIG C1 (Traffic Theory and Modelling/Optimization and Traffic Flow), World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS)
IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Associate Editor, 2018-to date: 21st (US), 22nd (New Zealand), 23rd (Greece), 24th (US), 25th (China), 26th (Spain), 27th (Canada), 28th (Australia)
IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Associate Editor (Korea, 2024), Session Chair (China, 2018)
IEEE, Senior Member
IEEE Access, Associate Editor (2017.10-2019.10), Outstanding Award (top 5%)
International Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems Research, Associate Editor (2021.3-2024.3)
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Engineering, Award Chair (2020-2021)
Forum on Integrated and Sustainable Transportation Systems, Delft, The Netherlands, Associate Editor, 2020
19th COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals, 2019, Nanjing, China, Area Editor: Traffic Operations, Control and Management
Guest Edited Issues
Transportation Research Part A: Human-machine Integrated Urban Traffic Management: Policy Innovation and Regulatory Tools Selection, 2025
Space Weather, Special Issue: Impact of Space Weather Events on Transportation System, 2023
IET Intelligent Transport Systems, Modelling, Operation and Management of Traffic Mixed with Connected and Automated Vehicles, 2021
Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Special Issue: Shared Mobility and Environment, 2020
Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Special Issue: Emerging Methods for Data-driven Urban Transportation and Mobility Modeling, 2019
Transportmetrica A: Transport Science, Special Issue: Methodological Advancements in Understanding and Managing Urban Traffic Congestion, 2018
Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Special Issue: Vehicle Sensor Data-based Transportation Research, 2018
Published Journal Papers
First-author papers have been published in many journals, including
Transportation Research Part A
Transportation Research Part B
Transportation Research Part C
Transportation Research Part D
Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics
ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering
Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems
Transportation Letters
Proceedings of ICE-Transport
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
International Journal of Modern Physics C, etc.
Corresponding-author papers
Transportation Research Part A
Transportation Research Part C
Transportation Research Part D
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Transportation
Transport Policy
Journal of Transport Geography
Information Fusion
Transportmetrica A: Transport Science
Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics
IET Intelligent Transport Systems
Transportation Research Record
International Journal of Sustainable Transportation
International Journal of Modern Physics B
International Journal of Modern Physics C
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, etc.
Publications (by selected topics)
Solo Author | "Simple" Series
Data-Driven Traffic Modeling | Microscopic Traffic Modeling | Traffic Stabilization | Autonomous Intersection | Intelligent Vehicles
Time-Space Traffic Diagram | Sensing: Mapping to Cells | Traffic State Estimation
Sustainability | Public Transit | Micromobility
Resilience
Large Language Models | Machine Learning and Prediction | Data Analysis
Day-to-Day Route Choice | Route Guidance | Network Equilibrium
Policy
Review and Perspectives
0. Latest Publications in 2025
Environmental impacts and emission reduction methods of vehicles equipped with driving automation systems: An operational-level review, Transportation Research Part C, 2025
Identifying users transferring between transportation modes: A stable matching approach, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2025
Platoon or Individual: An Adaptive Car-following Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles, Chaos Solitons & Fractals, 2025
Brain Driving: Personalizing Vehicle Speed with DR-EEG Decoding and Situational Embeddings, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, online
CoT-Drive Efficient Motion Forecasting for Autonomous Driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought Prompting, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, online
A Survey on Large Language Model-empowered Autonomous Driving, Engineering, accepted (arXiv.2409.14165)
Estimating city-wide operating mode distribution of light-duty vehicles: A neural network-based approach, Transportation Research Record, accepted (arXiv: 2503.22118)
On the resilience evaluation of urban multimodal transportation network considering dynamic travel demand, Transportation Research Record
Exploring the relationship between built environment and bike-sharing demand: Does the trip length matter? Transportation Planning and Technology, online
A review of stop-and-go traffic wave suppression strategies: Variable speed limit vs. jam-absorption driving, arXiv:2504.11372, 2025
NeuralMOVES: A lightweight and microscopic vehicle emission estimation model based on reverse engineering and surrogate learning, arXiv:2502.04417, 2025
1. Solo Author
Refining time-space traffic diagrams: A simple multiple linear regression model, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024
Portraying ride-hailing mobility using multi-day trip order data: A case study of Beijing, China, Transportation Research Part A, 2021 (2022 Key innovation in Transportation Sector, Ministry of Transport, China)
Spatial-temporal fractal of urban agglomeration travel demand, Physica A, 2020
Cooperative driving and a lane change-free road transportation system, Chapter of IET Book Traffic Information and Control, 2020
Research based on high-fidelity NGSIM vehicle trajectory datasets: A review. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11429.60643, 2017
1. "Simple" Series
Refining time-space traffic diagrams: A simple multiple linear regression model, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024
Mapping to cells: a simple method to extract traffic dynamics from probe vehicle data, Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering. 2017
A simple nonparametric car-following model driven by field data. Transportation Research Part B, 2015
2. Data-Driven Traffic Modeling
A simple nonparametric car-following model driven by field data. Transportation Research Part B, 2015
On the impact of prior experiences in car following models model development, computational efficiency, comparative analyses and extensive applications, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 2023
A data-driven lane-changing model based on deep learning, Transportation Research Part C, 2019
2. Microscopic Traffic Modeling
The impact of a single discretionary lane change on surrounding traffic: An analytic investigation, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2023
Empirical validation of vehicle type-dependent car-following heterogeneity from micro- and macro-viewpoints, Transportmetrica B, 2019
A new car-following model from the perspective of visual imaging. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 2015
A flexible traffic stream model and its three representations of traffic flow, Transportation Research Part C, 2017
An anisotropic continuum model and its calibration with an improved monkey algorithm, Transportmetrica A, 2017
2. Traffic Stabilization
A jam-absorption driving strategy for mitigating traffic oscillations, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2017
Heterogeneous traffic mixing regular and connected vehicles: Modelling and stabilization, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2019
Cooperative Driving Strategies of Connected Vehicles for Stabilizing Traffic Flow, Transportmetrica B, 2020
A new reinforcement learning-based variable speed limit control approach to improve traffic efficiency against freeway jam waves, Transportation Research Part C, 2022
String stability analysis of connected vehicular systems based on car-following model, ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems, 2021
2. Autonomous Intersection
Erasing lane changes from roads: A design of future intersections, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, 2018
Pedestrian shuttle service optimization for autonomous intersection management, Transportation Research Part C, 2024
Is All-Direction Turn Lane a Good Choice for Autonomous Intersections? A Study of Method Development and Comparisons, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2023
2. Intelligent Vehicles
Optimal toll design problems under mixed traffic flow of human-driven vehicles and connected and autonomous vehicles, Transportation Research Part C, 2021
Platoon or Individual: An Adaptive Car-following Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles, Chaos Solitons & Fractals, 2025
Dynamic lane changing trajectory planning for CAV: A multi-agent model with path preplanning, Transportmetrica B, 2022
Exploring the impact mechanism of communicating information on the perturbation propagation, Transportmetrica A, 2024
Safety rule-based cellular automaton modeling and simulation under V2V environment, Transportmetrica A, 2021
Digital Twin Empowered Mobile Edge Computing for Intelligent Vehicular Lane-Changing, IEEE Network, 2021
3. Time-Space Traffic Diagram
Refining time-space traffic diagrams: A simple multiple linear regression model, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024
Constructing spatiotemporal speed contour diagrams: using rectangular or non-rectangular parallelogram cells, Transportmetrica B, 2019
Estimating carbon dioxide emissions of freeway traffic: a spatiotemporal cell-based model, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2020
From rectangle to parallelogram: An area-weighted method to make time-space diagrams incorporate traffic waves, Digital Transportation and Safety, 2024
Visualizing traffic dynamics based on floating car data, ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, 2017
Learning traffic as images: A deep convolutional neural network for large-scale transportation network speed prediction, Sensors, 2017
Probe data-driven travel time forecasting for urban expressways by matching similar spatiotemporal traffic patterns. Transportation Research Part C, 2017
3. Sensing: Mapping to Cells
Network-wide identification of turn-level intersection congestion using only low-frequency probe vehicle data, Transportation Research Part C, 2019
Mapping to cells: a simple method to extract traffic dynamics from probe vehicle data, Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering. 2017
3. Traffic State Estimation
TSR-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Traffic State Reconstruction with Trajectory Data, Physica A, 2022
Real-time estimation of freeway travel time with recurrent congestion based on sparse detector data. IET Intelligent Transport Systems. 2018
A stochastic extension of Newell’s “three-detector method". Transportation Research Record, 2012
Estimation of lane-level travel time distributions under a connected environment, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2021
4. Sustainability
Estimating carbon dioxide emissions of freeway traffic: a spatiotemporal cell-based model, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2020
Environmental impacts and emission reduction methods of vehicles equipped with driving automation systems: An operational-level review, Transportation Research Part C, 2025
Planning dynamic wireless charging infrastructure for battery electric bus systems with the joint optimization of charging scheduling, Transportation Research Part C, 2024
Mapping sidewalk accessibility with smartphone imagery and Visual AI: a participatory approach, Philosophical Transactions A, 2024
Estimating city-wide operating mode distribution of light-duty vehicles: A neural network-based approach, Transportation Research Record, accepted
A sustainable road pricing oriented bilevel optimization approach under multiple environmental uncertainties, International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, 2022
Time-of-day pricing for toll roads under traffic demand uncertainties: A distributionally robust simulation-based optimization method, Transportation Research Part C, 2022
Emissions-reduction strategy for connected autonomous vehicles on mixed traffic freeways, Physica A, 2024
4. Public Transit
Optimal design of community shuttles with an adaptive-operator-selection-based genetic algorithm, Transportation Research Part C, 2021
Optimal timetable development for community shuttle network with metro stations. Transportation Research Part C, 2015
Demand responsive service-based optimization on flexible routes and departure time of community shuttles, Sustainability, 2020
Short-term prediction of urban rail transit origin-destination flow: A channel-wise attentive split-convolutional neural network method, Transportation Research Part C, 2021
Identifying users transferring between transportation modes: A stable matching approach, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2025
4. Shared Mobility
Portraying ride-hailing mobility using multi-day trip order data: A case study of Beijing, China, Transportation Research Part A, 2021 (2022 Key innovation in Transportation Sector, Ministry of Transport, China)
A prediction-based forward-looking vehicle dispatching strategy for dynamic ride-pooling, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024
Understanding user’s travel behavior and city region functions from station-free shared bike usage data, Transportation Research Part F, 2020
Time-dependent trip generation for bike sharing planning: A multi-task memory-augmented graph neural network, Information Fusion, 2024
Exploring competitiveness of taxis to ride-hailing services from a multidimensional spatio-temporal perspective: A case study in Beijing, China, Journal of Transport Geography, 2024
Shared mobility: Characteristics, impacts, and improvements, Transportation Research Part D, 2021
Predicting station-level hourly demand in a large-scale bike-sharing network: A graph convolutional neural network approach, Transportation Research Part C, 2018
5. Resilience
On the dynamic vulnerability of an urban rail transit system and the impact of human mobility, Journal of Transport Geography, 2024 (Best Paper Award, TRB 2024-AMR10)
On the resilience evaluation of urban multimodal transportation network considering dynamic travel demand, Transportation Research Record, Accepted
Vulnerability and resilience of transportation systems: A recent literature review, Physica A, 2021
Multi-crowdsourced data fusion for modeling link-level traffic resilience to adverse weather events, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2024
6. Large Language Models
ChatGPT as your vehicle co-pilot: An initial attempt, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, 2023
Semantic understanding and prompt engineering for large-scale traffic data imputation using graph transformer, Information Fusion, 2024
CoT-Drive: Efficient motion forecasting for autonomous driving with LLMs and Chain-of-Thought prompting, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, accepted
A survey on large language model-empowered autonomous driving, Engineering, accepted (arXiv.2409.14165)
6. Machine Learning and Prediction
Trajectory prediction for autonomous driving using spatial-temporal graph attention transformer, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2022
A generative adversarial network for travel times imputation using trajectory data, Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 2021
Spatiotemporal fusion transformer for large-scale traffic forecasting, Information Fusion, 2024
A cohesion-based heuristic feature selection for short-term traffic forecasting, IEEE Access, 2019
Learning traffic as images: A deep convolutional neural network for large-scale transportation network speed prediction, Sensors, 2017
6. Data Analysis
Spatial-temporal fractal of urban agglomeration travel demand, Physica A, 2020
Analysis of travel demand between transportation hubs in urban agglomeration based on mobile phone call detail record data, ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, 2022
Mining crowdsourced trajectory and geo-tagged data for spatial-semantic road map construction, Transactions in GIS, 2022
An interactive city choice model and its application for measuring the intercity interaction, Frontiers in Physics, 2022
Bus-car mode identification: A traffic condition-based random forests method, ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems, 2020
A figure-eight hysteresis pattern in macroscopic fundamental diagrams and its microscopic causes. Transportation Letters, 2015
7. Day-to-Day Route Choice
Investigating day-to-day route choices based on multi-scenario laboratory experiments. Part I: route-dependent attraction and its modeling, Transportation Research Part A, 2023
Investigating day-to-day route choices based on multi-scenario laboratory experiments. Part II: A route-dependent attraction-based stochastic process model, Communications in Transportation Research, 2024
Day-to-day rerouting modeling and analysis with absolute and relative bounded rationalities, Transportmetrica A. 2018
An analyzable agent-based framework for modeling day-to-day route choice, Transportmetrica A, 2022
7. Route Guidance
A traffic-condition-based route guidance strategy for a single destination road network. Transportation Research Part C, 2013
A self-regulation traffic-condition-based route guidance strategy with realistic considerations: overlapping routes, stochastic traffic and signalized intersections, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2016
Effectiveness of GRIPs in alleviating traffic congestion, Proceedings of ICE-Transport, 2016
Data-based sorting algorithm for variable message sign location, Transportation Research Record, 2017
7. Network Equilibrium
A multi-modal network equilibrium model considering captive travelers and mode correlation, Transportation, 2024
A dynamic user equilibrium model for multi-region macroscopic fundamental diagram systems with time-varying delays, Transportation Research Part B, 2020
Selfish routing equilibrium in stochastic traffic network: A probability-dominant description, PLoS ONE, 2017
An N-path logit-based stochastic user equilibrium model, IEEE Access, 2018
A train operation diagram-based equilibrium model for an urban rail transit network with transfer constraint. ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems, 2020
8. Policy
Closing the loophole of vehicle ownership restriction: The impact of non-local vehicle restriction on new vehicle registrations and air pollution, Transportation Research Part A, 2024
Private vehicle drivers' acceptance of autonomous vehicles: The role of trait mindfulness, Transport Policy, 2024
The effect of the ‘yield to pedestrians’ policy on risky pedestrian behaviors: Is it a ‘two-edged sword’? Transportation Research Part A, 2023
How to promote the transition from solo driving to mobility services delivery? An empirical study focusing on ridesharing, Transport Policy, 2022
Commuters' acceptance of and behavior reactions to license plate restriction policy: A case study of Tianjin, China, Transportation Research Part D. 2017
9. Review and Perspectives
Environmental impacts and emission reduction methods of vehicles equipped with driving automation systems: An operational-level review, Transportation Research Part C, 2025
Trajectory data-based traffic flow studies: A revisit, Transportation Research Part C, 2020
Automated vehicle-involved traffic flow studies: A survey of assumptions, models, speculations, and perspectives, Transportation Research Part C, 2021
Space weather effects on transportation systems: A review of current understanding and future outlook, Space Weather, 2024
Vulnerability and resilience of transportation systems: A recent literature review, Physica A, 2021
Vehicle Sensor Data-based Transportation Research: Modeling, Analysis, and Management, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2019
Route guidance strategies revisited: Comparison and evaluation in an asymmetric two-route traffic system. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 2014
A review of stop-and-go traffic wave suppression strategies: Variable speed limit vs. jam-absorption driving, arXiv:2504.11372, 2025
Other Pages: General Information, Slides and Presentations, List of All Publications
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
— Carl Sagan

I am a passionate researcher who focuses on and enjoys research

Adjunct Professor @ Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, United States

Google Scholar, GitHub, ORCID: 0000-0001-5716-3853 Email: he dot zb at hotmail dot com

Research Interests

Academic Service

Guest Edited Issues

Published Journal Papers

Publications (by selected topics)