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October 29, 2009
Future Urban Mobility is SMART’s Fourth IRG
Singapore – The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s (SMART) fourth Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) was announced at a press conference organised by the National Research Foundation (NRF) on Thursday, 29 October 2009.
The Future Urban Mobility IRG’s grand challenge is to develop innovative mobility solutions that simultaneously tackle two opposing objectives:
- To improve the safety, comfort and time associated with transportation, getting individuals and good where they need to be, and when they need to be there; and
- To reverse the alarming, unsustainable energy and environmental trends associated with transportation, and devise transportation systems that materially enhance sustainability and societal well-being.
Its overarching goal is to develop new paradigms for the planning, design, and operation of future urban transportation systems, developing urban mobility innovations for the 21st Century. The approach taken is to achieve better utilisation of the very expensive existing infrastructure, NOT simply to add capacity by building more roadways, guideways or highways.
The project is structured around three research pillars:
- Networked computing and control
- Advanced transportation science models, optimization and simulations; and
- Performance assessment and implementation
Lead principal investigator Amedeo Odoni, a Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, will head the Future Urban Mobility project. The IRG’s interdisciplinary team will consist of at least 70 PhD and post-doctoral students, some 60 faculty from MIT and Singapore, and additional collaborators from other organizations and agencies, such as LTA, URA and DSO. The IRG will also engage colleagues from around the globe to identify mobility innovations relevant to a variety of urban environments and ensure applicability beyond Singapore. |
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