Co-investigators Saman Amarasinghe , Cynthia Barnhart , Moshe Ben-Akiva , Rex Britter , Joseph Ferreira , Patrick Jaillet , Dina Katabi , Li-Shiuan Peh , Carlo Ratti , Daniela Rus , P Zegras
Project Website http://smart.mit.edu/research/future-urban-mobility/future-urban-mobility.html
The Future Urban Mobility IRG’s grand challenge is to develop innovative mobility solutions that simultaneously tackle two opposing objectives:
(1) To improve the safety, comfort and time associated with transportation, getting individuals and good where they need to be, and when they need to be there; and(2) To reverse the alarming, unsustainable energy and environmental trends associated with transportation, and devise transportation systems that materially enhance sustainability and societal well-being.
FM's mission is to develop, in and beyond Singapore, new paradigms for the planning, design and operation of future urban mobility systems.
Innovative urban mobility systems, aimed at both passengers and freight, will materially enhance sustainability and societal well-being on a global scale. The FM IRG will:
(*) harness and enhance promising networked computing and control (NCC) technology-enabled innovations that may contribute to improved future urban mobility;(*) develop decision models that can be applied to support various novel mobility concepts, such as the pervasive use of real-time information, mobility-on-demand services and green logistics;(*) investigate the potential and impacts of these innovations and decision models; and(*) assess their implications for urban development and urban planning organisations and institutions.
Emphasis will be placed on innovations in public transport, but private automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic will also be addressed. The IRG will adopt approaches that integrate information on human and commercial activities, land use, transportation, environmental impacts, and energy use.
Future Urban Mobility is structured around three pillars, designed to advance the state-of-the-art in critical areas:
Pillar 1: Networked Computing and Control (NCC) will seek to develop a framework of common, re-usable services and algorithms, packaged as software libraries and run-time software infrastructure for urban mobility systems.
Pillar 2: Integrated modelling of mobility, land-use, environmental, and energy-use impacts will develop a suite of powerful demand estimation, performance prediction, and operation optimisation tools, drawing on the availability of NCC-enabled information.
Pillar 3: Performance assessment and implementation will enable more meaningful evaluation of alternative sustainability mobility systems and the development of institutional, regulatory, and pricing mechanisms to support them.