Overview
The three major elements of urban mobility can be broken down in:
- Mobility infrastructure and services are the backbone of smart cities
- Ensuring an effective and sustainable mobility of citizens and goods
- increased size of cities and increased mobility needs may lead to traffic congestion and other negatives externalities in environmental sustainability, health and economic growth
ICT developments can contribute positively to the aforementioned elements by:
- Infrastructuring the mobility system with sensors and actuators
- The ability to monitor and control in real-time (optimising the efficiency of mobility process)
- Advanced data analytics solutions
- 'Big data' approach
- Adding an effective 'nervous system' to smart cities
The SUPERHUB project aims at realising a new services mobility framework supporting an integrated and eco-efficient use of multi-modal mobility systems in an urban setting
The objectives of the SuperHub project are mainly to improve energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions and foster economic growth in urban environments by providing a user-centric framework for developing, integrating and negotiating in real-time different providers and consumers of mobility resources.
More specifically, the most important goals are:
- reducing the overall environmental footprint of urban mobility
- minimising the aggregated time spent in moving across urban areas
- enabling the arising and reinforcement of a mobility services ecosystem, able to facilitate the interaction of public administrations, goods transport companies, interested groups, citizens and other stakeholders.
SUPERHUB provides a user-centric, integrated approach to multi-modal smart urban mobility systems, through an open platform able to consider in real time various mobility offers and provide a set of mobility services able to address user needs, promote user participation and to foster environmental friendly and energy efficient behavioural changes. Moreover, the take-up of virtuous behaviours, characterized by a reduced environmental footprint, is also facilitated by the SUPERHUB open platform matchmaking and negotiation capabilities between (public-private) providers and consumers of mobility offers and by the use of persuasive technologies to achieve wide adoption of results.
To achieve these objectives SUPERHUB will develop a persuasive engine based on captology principles to facilitate the voluntary adoption of environmentally-friendly multi-mobility habits, novel methods and tools for real-time reasoning on large data streams coming from heterogeneous sources, new algorithms and protocols for inferring traffic conditions from mobile users by coupling data from mobile operator networks with information coming from GPS based mobile phones and for dynamic matchmaking or resources that will generate journey plans best fulfilling user mobility needs and preferences while minimizing negative environmental impact. Specific services and user studies will be realized to demonstrate the SUPERHUB concepts and technologies through field trials in Barcelona, Helsinki and Milan, involving large end-users communities. Results of SUPERHUB field trials shall influence local policy makers and municipalities in the definition of new energy-aware mobility strategies and planning.