Juan de Dios Ortúzar

Juan de Dios Ortúzar Salas (born 24 January 1949) is a Chilean industrial engineer and Emeritus Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC). Regarded as a pioneer of discrete-choice modelling, he developed methods for estimating travellers’ willingness to pay for safer, cleaner and quicker journeys.

Early life and education Ortúzar earned a BSc in mathematics and a civil-engineering degree at PUC.

He helped to found the Institute for Complex Engineering Systems (2007); the BRT⁺ Centre of Excellence for Bus Rapid Transit (2010); and the Centre for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS) in 2012.

Research and influence Combining stated-preference and revealed-preference data, Ortúzar's work quantifies how travellers trade time, money, safety and environmental quality. The valuation techniques devised with his group have been applied in appraisal studies and legal cases in Australia, Colombia, Germany, Norway and Spain.

Selected works Ortúzar J. de D. & Willumsen L. G., Modelling Transport (5th ed., Wiley, 2024). Caussade S.; Ortúzar J. de D.; Rizzi L. I.; Hensher D. A. “Assessing the influence of design dimensions on stated-choice experiment estimates.” Transportation Research B 39 (2005). Sillano M. & Ortúzar J. de D. “Willingness-to-pay estimation with mixed logit models.” Environment and Planning A 37 (2005).

Honours Among other distinctions, Ortúzar received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2010), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (2012), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Cantabria, Spain (2018).