Overview
This research project aims at developing an integrated model of land-use, transport and energy for the evaluation of a range of "green policies" aiming at enhancing sustainability and well-being. The model includes both individual/household behaviour components and organization/firm behaviour components and is based in the simulation of agents' behaviour at a micro level. The outputs of the model can be translated to aggregate energy and resource consumptions which can be also related to aggregate system dynamics approaches e.g. urban metabolism models.
The main objective of this project is to develop an integrated model of land use, transportation, resource-consumption and energy for the evaluation of a range of "green policies" aiming at enhancing sustainability and well-being.
Specific objectives of the project are the following:
- Develop individual/household and organization/firm behaviour models regarding transportation, energy consumption and land use;
- Implement a simulation platform that integrates those behaviour models;
- Develop a framework to translate each agent micro-behaviour into aggregate energy and resource consumption, which can be related to aggregate system dynamics approaches e.g. urban metabolism models;
The research methodology involved a bottom-up model development: from building isolated micro-simulation models to integrating their aggregation at a macro-level. Data acquisition has been achieved from two channels: individual/volunteer and organization/firm. Strong support was given for this task by the industry partner ISA-Portugal.
Funding
Results
The achievements of the projects include:
- awarding of the Eureka! Excellence seal, signifying membership in a unique European excellence network of high impact research;
- publishing of two conference papers (ISOCARP09, describing the framework; IsAMI10 describing the smartphone activity inference mechanism) and one workshop paper (Urbansim Conference 2010, describing integration of OPUS and DynaMIT).
- implementation of a social network software system called Greenhomes that supported the energy consumption and activity based survey during 2010/11;
- completion of one Masters thesis at MIT (Anwar Gauche), externally funded by MIT-MITEI and available at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/58185#files-area
Other results
Publications:
(Almeida et al., 2009) "A Framework for Integrated Modeling of Urban Systems" - Almeida, A. M., Ben-Akiva, M., Pereira, F. C., Ghauche, A., Guevara, C., Niza, S. and Zegras, C. , 45 ISOCARP Congress 2009, ISOCARP 2009, Porto, October 2009
(Niza and Pereira, 2010) "A modelação de sistemas de transportes e de energia no programa MIT Portugal" - Samuel Niza and Francisco Pereira, Climatização. 2010
(Santos, 2010) The integrated transportation and energy activity-based model (iTEAM) envisions to enhance sustainability and well-being through the evaluation of "green policies" – Bruno Santos. Urbansim Conference. Zurich 2010. Presentation.
(Teixeira and Bento, 2010). "Automatic Generation of Personal Maps" – José Ricardo Teixeira and Carlos Bento. International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2010)