Projects


Information systems for inclusive mobility in Smart Cities

Urban mobility is always a challenge. Can you imagine what that challenge must be like for a blind or a deaf person?

Mobility is a major challenge for any city, by inclusive mobility is an even bigger challenge and is seldom a priority. Inclusive mobility addresses the specific needs of elderly people or people with various types of impairments, such as deaf people, blind people, autistic people, people in wheelchairs, or anyone suffering from temporarily reduced mobility, e.g. pregnant women. A smart city should provide these citizens with adequate mobility alternatives and proper information for allowing those people to mitigate their many limitations. For example, for some of these people, it might be important to avoid streets that are too noisy or with the frequent passage of emergency vehicles, for others it may be better to avoid streets with strong slopes, and others may simply need to avoid streets with too many obstacles. In this project, we seek to study how the integration of multiple systems, may allow these citizens to plan their urban journeys based on different criteria. The approach considers the characterization of streets in terms of their suitability to the different segments of inclusive mobility. This type of Geographic Information System is a fundamental aspect that may need to be embraced by municipalities aiming to tackle inclusive mobility. Other complementary strategies include the integration with emerging mobility paradigms such as mobility-as-a-service, which should allow door-to-door inclusive multi-modal solutions to be achieved. Route optimization algorithms, artificial intelligence, applied mobile computing, image processing or cyber-physical systems are some of the competences that together can contribute to innovative citizen-centered inclusive mobility solutions.

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