“Urbanite”: Using Big Data and algorithms to reorganize urban mobility
News from May 13, 2020
How can new technologies contribute to a sustainable digital transformation of cities? This is the question that the recently launched EU project “Urbanite” explores. The project aims to create a prototypical data management platform that will help city administrations to organize mobility in a sustainable manner. Fraunhofer FOKUS is responsible for the development of the platform, which integrates data-driven decision-making tools.
In cities and urban areas, mobility is constantly reinventing itself. More and more people share cars or are on the move with rental bikes and electric scooters. This change brings new, disruptive business models, but also challenges for public administration with it. Whether it's striking taxi drivers, scarce public parking spaces, growing numbers of electric charging stations or e-scooters as a hurdles for pedestrians - the administration is in demand to reorganize mobility. Technologies such as Big Data Analytics, predictive algorithms and decision support systems can help.
The project partners of Urbanite are developing a long-term functioning model for sustainable urban development with a focus on mobility at European level. A data management platform, developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS, as well as algorithms for data-driven decision making will help to collect data from heterogeneous sources. This way, knowledge will be extracted, solutions will be simulated and behavioural patterns can be anticipated in order to delimit unforeseen consequences.
The model will be developed in cooperation with citizens, public administrations and mobility service providers and validated by real-world use cases in the cities of Amsterdam, Bilbao, Helsinki and Messina.
The consortium of the project comprises eleven partners from six European countries and is led by “Tecnalia Research and Innovation”. The project is funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Union and runs under project number 870338 until March 2023.