SCC-IRG Track 1: Fostering Smart and Sustainable Travel through Engaged Communities using Integrated Multidimensional Information-Based Solutions

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This Smart and Connected Communities award supports research that will develop systematic deployment tools that smart and connected communities can use to achieve their sustainable travel goals in a quantifiable manner by leveraging advances in information, communication and sensor technologies. While the deployment of advanced technological solutions offers great promise for communities to improve residents' quality of life and prosperity, they are faced with significant challenges in realizing these aspirations due to the diversity in technological and travel needs and barriers faced by the residents. Solutions to achieve sustainability objectives related to enhancing travel mobility, safety, equity, and access will be developed using the City of Peachtree Corners (GA) as an immersive living lab. They include building novel partnerships involving emerging micromobility services in the private sector and the well-established public transit modes. Further, they will involve personalized behavioral interventions to nudge and incentivize personal auto users to consider sustainable alternatives through seamless information provision. At the community level, public policy interventions will seek to enable flexible and novel travel alternatives while ensuring that all residents have access to timely travel-related information. For underserved and underrepresented residents, the solutions will include strategies to overcome information deserts in lower-income neighborhoods, age-related technology savviness issues for senior residents, and reduced access to smartphones and transportation options. These solutions will be developed using data collected from community residents and other sources, and deployed using an information design system that provides targeted information delivery to the various stakeholders in the community using multiple delivery mechanisms, including a community app.This project will advance theory and deployment paradigms associated with holistic, community-level decision-making to achieve travel sustainability goals characterized by multiple, disparate objectives while meeting the needs and constraints of different stakeholders. In particular, it will address the challenges of how to integrate disparate, multi-source data from various stakeholders and use it to systematically generate multidimensional solution options (partnerships, behavioral interventions, policy interventions) to meet multiple sustainability objectives at the community level in a systematic, quantifiable manner over time. It will draw on methods from multi-objective and multi-agent optimization, machine learning, behavioral economics, and data and policy analytics, to generate the multidimensional solutions. Further, it will lead to novel paradigms and algorithms for the solution options themselves, and for the development of generalizable principles related to practical deployment frameworks in the inherently complex, multidimensional smart and connected communities. The project will also develop formal methods for information design and delivery that translate the multidimensional solutions into actionable information that is seamless for the various stakeholders.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.