Reinventing mobility to imagine the city of tomorrow

Transport infrastructures play a large part in defining the city of the future, which should be smart, sustainable and resilient. Their management will need to deal with the emergence of novel technologies (i.e. autonomous cars, Internet of Things), the apparition of novel modalities (hoverboard, etc), and changes of practices (increase of multi-modality, electric bicycles, shared cars). These aspects could favour and accelerate the transition to the city of the future with positive social, environmental and economic impacts, in order to address foreseen trends (climate change and new requirements in terms of pollution, security, and global costs).

The SwITCh project seek to integrate a large variety of urban transport modalities (private car, walk, tramway, bicycle, etc.) and associated infrastructures (pavement, tram track, bicycle path, etc.). It aims to support decision-making for urban planning by simulating the gradual introduction of disruptive innovations on technology, usage and behaviour of infrastructures. Achieving such an objective requires providing a model that is able to assess the impact of these innovations on several key indicators related to mobility, user satisfaction and security, economic costs, and air pollution. It requires a holistic vision of urban transport to avoid indirect consequences of choices or rebound effect (e.g. a solution improving air pollution but reducing security). The model must include current and future infrastructures and modalities, and consider the transition process between current and future situations. We do not provide an a priori list of potential innovations; some of them are already considered (e.g. autonomous car, smart infrastructures, car sharing, etc.), but others will appear from the WP1. Being able to consider a large variety of disruptive innovations and indicators requires a high flexibility of the model; this issue will be at the centre of the modelling process.

A method combining Artificial Intelligence and a participatory approach

SwITCh uses agent-based modelling (ABM) and participative simulation as a unifying framework that allows coupling different models and taking into account both temporal and spatial scales in order to build a holistic model. It will include a city model based on real geographic data (GIS) and a complex realistic model of population behaviour. The model will be designed as a support tool for helping stakeholders (i.e. decision-makers, managers, technicians, urban planners, citizens) to enrich their reflection and build a shared project to improve transport infrastructures to meet the challenges of future cities.

This model will integrate an agent-based model (ABM) of citizens’ mobility based on their activities, available transport modalities and available information, and will consider infrastructure and vehicles as autonomous cognitive agents. The model will be implemented with the GAMA open-source platform. Experiments using the model will be conducted in a real context for two case studies, with the active involvement of two cities: Bordeaux Metropole (urban agency A’Urba) and Dijon Metropole. This participatory modelling approach will raise questions and support reflection on the potential future for the cities. The use of Agile methods to drive the project and ComMod (companion modelling) for participatory modelling and simulation will create lively exchanges inside the consortium, especially between the partner cities and researchers, thus directly addressing the cities’ questions and also opening innovative options to the cities. One of the crucial aspects of the project is to involve all the stakeholders, from the citizens to the policy makers and technical services, in the urban planning process. Thus, the model will be designed as a support tool for consultation and discussion. The ambition of the project is not to produce a simulator that can predict what will happen and to solve all the problems; this is obviously impossible. But, it aims at helping stakeholders to enrich their reflection and build a shared project to improve transport infrastructures in order to meet the challenges of future cities.

Expected results

The SwITCh project will deliver several main results. Firstly, it will generate and formalise knowledge on future transport infrastructures. Secondly, the project will result in a simulation tool that could have significant socio-economic impacts: by helping infrastructure managers and urban planners, as a reflection support, to adapt infrastructures to future needs, by accelerating the transition to a more sustainable city which should have positive environmental (e.g. air pollution, global warming), economical (e.g. maintenance cost, commercial appeal) and social (e.g. traffic, living environment) impacts. The model will be flexible, easily adaptable to any city, and able to integrate a wide variety of prospective and disruptive scenarios.