Zengxiang Lei

I am a postdoctoral associate at Purdue University working on transportation AI, simulation, and cyber-physical systems. My research builds scalable models and decision systems for ride-hailing, shared autonomous electric fleets, evacuation, and transportation security.

I completed my Ph.D. in Transportation and Infrastructure Systems Engineering at Purdue University, where my dissertation focused on efficient and secure ride-hailing services. I also served as student lead for the U.S. Department of Energy METS-R project and helped build METS-R SIM, an open-source city-scale multimodal electric mobility simulator.

My current research is organized around three connected directions:

• Transportation AI: reinforcement learning for pricing, relocation, and control in mobility-on-demand systems, including my Transportation Research Part B work on dynamic pricing in ride-hailing systems.
• Network-level simulation: city-scale simulation for multimodal electric mobility and service operations, centered on METS-R SIM.
• CPS operation and security: simulation-supported analysis of cyber-physical transportation systems, including network-level risks from adversarial booking attacks.