DSMM Group - Research Areas


Planning and management of innovative transport systems

transport
Planners face greater challenges today than ever before in designing transport strategies for urban areas. No longer it is expected that the answer lies primarily with increasing the capacity of the road system. The current trend in urban transport policy shows instead an increasing attention to soft, reversible and flexible mobility management measures, through the implementation of demand management schemes and intelligent transport systems (ITS). Such measures are characterized by the use of advanced information and communication technologies to enhance efficiency, equity, and security of transport systems. Moreover, such measures do not require new heavy infrastructures but try to shift the users’ modal choice from the private car to more sustainable modes.

Some of them try to improve the average level of car occupancy (e.g. car pooling), others discourage the use of the private car introducing costs (e.g. park pricing and road pricing), or making public transportation competitive and appealing (dial-a-ride, park-and-ride, car and bike sharing). Others are non-price measures aiming at providing disincentives to car usage and providing incentives for the use of other transport modes, including walk (e.g. access control management measures).

The research group has been carrying out several projects concerning the design, test, validation and/or implementation of the following measures.

Dial-a-ride

Dial-a-ride is a demand-responsive transportation system, in which a fleet of vehicles, with flexible routes and schedules, serves customers who have submitted their requests. Each request specifies the characteristics of the desired trip, the number of passengers and the approximate time when the trip must occur. The service differs from a traditional taxi service because it serves more requests at the same time and it has cheaper fares. We contributed to develope a web-based software to plan and manage a dial-a-ride service that is able to manage:
  • an off-line as well an on-line passenger demand;
  • several transportation companies, with different quality of service levels;
  • numerous territorial areas;
  • different categories of users (students, disabled, elderly, ...).
The software communicates with the vehicles via cell-phone technology (GSM/SMS, GPRS) and controls the pick-up and the delivery of the customers in real-time. The software is able to respond to the possible delays, due for example to traffic congestion, reassigning the customers to other vehicles. The transportation companies manage online their fleet, for instance having access to the real-time situation, and modifying the buses’ compositions and schedules. The software can manage simultaneously dial-a-ride services on areas operated by different companies and the transportation authority has access in real-time to their data.

Car pooling

Carpooling is a collective transport system based on a shared use of private cars, whose objective is to reduce the number of cars in use by grouping people. Carpooling has minimal incremental costs because it makes use of seats that would otherwise be empty. Especially in areas with sparse travel demand, it has lower costs per vehicle-km than public transport because it does not require a waged driver and avoids empty rides. We studied and implemented a web-based software tool for the commute carpooling problem, whose main characteristics are the following: (1) besides suggesting a matching between the users, the system provides the expected schedule and route for their trips; (2) the users are informed immediately in case of delay or changes via email or via short messages; (3) the software estimates the costs and benefits for each user; (4) the use of the system is restricted to the employees of given companies.

Info traveler systems

In general, poor information to customers is one of the major issues in public transportation services, which is the reason to allocate substantial efforts to implement a powerful information tool easy to use and access. The idea is that the effectiveness and competitiveness of public transportation can be improved through an integrated system based on real-time data management.
We studied and contributed to develope a web-based information integrated management system for traditional and innovative mobility services in urban areas. The direct objective of the system was to enable single citizens or groups of citizens to organize their trips using modes different from the private car, also in areas which are not intensively served by the public transportation service. The system was connected with a set of traditional transportation services, such as the municipal taxi system, the municipal park system, the local public transportation, and a set of innovative mobility services, such as dial-a-ride, car pooling, and car sharing services.

Road pricing

Pricing measures represent powerful demand management tools for transport demand management. They constitute disincentives for road usage and, if accompanied with other appropriate incentives to use other modes of transport, will produce significant effects on the pattern of demand. They can also reflect the marginal social, pollution and environment costs of congestion. We supported a demonstration of modal pricing measures and integrated payment systems in a tourist area, designing and testing an automatic access control for residents and time-based parking pricing for visitors.