CityMotion may revolutionize the movement of city dwellers

Researchers are working on a program (a dynamic integrated system) of public transport dynamics that would improve the movement of city dwellers. CityMotion: The project aims to collect real time data from several different systems and sensors already existing in the city and compile them to better anticipate and facilitate urban mobility.

Citymotion: The project was launched in 2006 by Francisco Camara Pereira, a researcher attached to the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Coimbra (FCTUC). In 2007 pegged at MIT-Portugal Program, the project now includes a dozen researchers, five Portuguese researchers from the Universities of Coimbra, Oporto and the Higher Technical Institute in Lisbon and five researchers from MIT. They are assisted by a dozen doctoral students.

The program uses such as data from sensors already existing on the edges and motorways including the recording passages of cars and information on the location of buses, trams and metro trains used by public transport to manage schedules. It also incorporates data from sensor networks in the level of pollution dispersed in the city to monitor air quality.

CityMotion is a decision support for choosing the best route depending on the actual conditions of roads at a time. The first application will be a planner of the road where citizens can choose in advance the route the fastest, cheapest and most environmentally friendly. The project will be tested first in Porto and Lisbon.

Goals:

The overall objectives behind this proposal are: a) Data acquisition: obtain and parse data that describe the state of transportation-related resources in a specific Portuguese city (to be defined), building a coherent spatial framework for data fusion. b) Data fusion: integrate the acquired data so that software applications can access specifically relevant data without prior knowledge of the data source or type, and in order to obtain additional information from the data such as predictions. c) Services: a pilot service that exemplifies the usage potential of the data collected and of the data fusion engine providing a service to citizens for making public transportation more efficient and pleasant to use, and providing support for policy making; a geographical modeling and visualization module that will use the information produced by the data fusion engine.

Ref.:
http://www.cisuc.uc.pt