Excellence in Research: Interoperable Transportation Service Roaming System for Transportation Disadvantaged Populations

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This Excellence in Research will promote social equality and improve transportation accessibility for millions of transportation-disadvantaged (TD) Americans by supporting fundamental research on a novel Interoperable Transportation Service Roaming (ITS-R) System. This ITS-R system enables independent mobility service providers to willingly share their vehicle fleets and demand information in order to reduce their operational costs and improve service quality for their riders. A diverse research team consisting of researchers from two HBCUs (Florida A&M University and Morgan State University) will conduct various research tasks ranging from service optimization to travel behavior modeling. Research findings will also be integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses taught at Florida A&M and Morgan State. Online education games adapted from the research tasks will be developed to motivate K-12 students to pursue engineering degrees. The collaboration with a transportation software company will also provide internship opportunities for the students to further attract them to pursue their careers in the transportation industry.The central research hypothesis is that inter-type and inter-provider barriers in TD mobility services can be mitigated through coordinated decision-making at the organizational (service provider) and individual (rider) levels. To test the hypothesis, five specific research tasks will be conducted, as follows: (1) To design a set of mechanisms for independent paratransit service providers to willingly share demand information and vehicle fleets, and for individual TD riders to shift their travel plans when appropriate external incentives are given; (2) To develop and test new vehicle routing and scheduling algorithms that account for demand exchange, fleet sharing, and availability of inclusive autonomous vehicles (IAVs); (3) To evaluate the implications of fleet automation on paratransit operations and design optimization algorithms for allocating and operating IAVs; (4) To understand and model the organizational (service provider) and individual (rider) behaviors when the ITS-R system is operational; and (5) To integrate various system modules and demonstrate the effectiveness of ITS-R through computational experiments based on real-world data. The successful completion of those research tasks would yield a set of new mechanisms, optimization methods, and behavioral findings that are critical for TD population groups to benefit from the ITS-R system. The research findings will also inform paratransit regulatory agencies in making effective financial and operational policies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.