SMART – Future Urban Mobility

This paper presents an overview of the Future Urban Mobility programme of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). Through this programme, MIT is establishing a research centre in Singapore with the mission to support sustainability and improve transportation system performance through innovations in infrastructure, technology, operations and policy. Two key areas of research are discussed in more detail. The first is Networked Computing and Control, which utilises personal mobile computing and communication devices to provide high quality information about the state of the transportation network to users and system managers, functioning as data collectors and computing engines. The second is the development and evaluation of future scenarios through a new comprehensive urban mobility simulation system, known as SimMobility. Introduction The confluence of several fundamental developments presents significant opportunities for new research in urban mobility. These developments include: advances in computing, communications and sensing technologies; the growing awareness of environmental sustainability issues; the ageing of physical infrastructure in developed countries and the need for massive new infrastructure projects in less developed ones; and the recognition of the vast economic stimulus that can be generated by the modernisation and renewal of urban mobility systems worldwide. The goal of the SMART (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology) Future Urban Mobility Interdisciplinary Research Group (FMIRG) is to develop a new paradigm for the planning, design and operation of future urban mobility systems. This new research centre is based on the premise that the advances in computing, communications and sensing technologies provide powerful capabilities to model, evaluate, realise and optimise nextgeneration urban mobility systems. The FM-IRG, launched on 1 July 2010, is a five-year research programme with 10 MIT principal investigators. This paper discusses two areas that represent a subset of FM-IRG’s research: Networked Computing and Control (NCC) and its application to real-time traffic management; and SimMobility, the new comprehensive modelling platform for future scenario development and evaluation.