Moshe Emanuel Ben-Akiva is an Israeli-American engineer who holds the Edmund K. Turner Professorship of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is noted for pioneering discrete-choice methods in travel-demand modelling and for co-creating DynaMIT, a real-time traffic-management simulation platform.

Ben-Akiva moved to the United States, obtaining an SM in 1971 and a PhD in transportation systems in 1973 from MIT. His doctoral research laid the foundations for the textbook Discrete Choice Analysis.

Immediately after completing his doctorate, Ben-Akiva joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor; he was promoted to full professor in 1981 and named Edmund K. Turner Professor in 1996. He founded and directs MIT’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory, whose DynaMIT software is used for real-time traffic prediction and was recognised with the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Outstanding Application Award.

Ben-Akiva has supervised more than fifty doctoral dissertations and teaches graduate subjects in discrete-choice analysis, demand modelling and dynamic traffic assignment.

Working at the interface of engineering and economics, Ben-Akiva introduced random-utility models that underpin modern activity-based demand forecasting. His subsequent integration of choice models with dynamic traffic assignment led to the microsimulation tools MITSIM and DynaMIT, which combine real-time sensor data with behavioural models to forecast congestion and test control strategies. Since the 2010s his group has blended machine-learning techniques with discrete choice to improve forecasts for on-demand mobility and urban freight systems.