Urban transport is essential for citizens to perform their daily activities, but at the same time constitutes one of the major sources of urban pollution (GHG emissions, local air quality, noise), directly affecting citizens’ health and well-being. The quest for environmentally sustainable urban transport, while ensuring competitiveness and addressing social concerns such as health problems or the needs of persons with reduced mobility, is a common and urgent challenge for all major cities in Europe.

 

The goal of EUNOIA is to take advantage of smart city technologies and complex systems science to develop new models and tools empowering city governments and their citizens to design sustainable mobility policies. EUNOIA will pursue advances in three complementary directions:

  1. Use of data. The massive penetration of ICT is modifying social relationships and travel behaviour, and at the same time is providing us with a huge amount of heterogeneous data: intelligent transport systems, Internet social networks, mobile phone call logs, e-transactions. EUNOIA will investigate how to exploit these data to characterise mobility and location patterns in different European cities.
  2. Urban transportation modelsEUNOIA will investigate the interactions between social networks and travel behaviour, e.g. the influence of social networks on the planning of joint trips. This will allow a more comprehensive assessment of mobility policies, particularly of new services emerging around the idea of a shared access to resources, such as car sharing. The new travel behaviour models will be integrated into state-of-the-art agent-based simulation tools
  3. Link between modellers, decision makers, and societal actorsThe potential of urban simulation models is still little exploited in policy decision contexts. EUNOIA will develop tools, e.g. 3D visual analytics, allowing stakeholders’ interaction with the simulation results, as well as a methodology for collaborative, multi-stakeholder policy assessment.

The models and methodologies developed by EUNOIA will be tested and refined through several case studies conducted in close cooperation with policy makers and mobility stakeholders from the three cities participating in the project: Barcelona, London, and Zurich.

 

Eunoia Project © 2012 | Developed by the IFISC lab