MIT and National Research Foundation of Singapore Launch Project on New Models and Tools for Future Urban Transportation

3 November 2009

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Research Foundation of Singapore launched a new project to develop new models and tools for the planning, design, and operation of future urban transportation. Aimed at making urban transportation systems more environmentally sustainable—first in Singapore, and ultimately on a global scale—these new models will be developed and deployed by nearly 60 researchers from four academic institutions.

The fourth Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre (SMART Centre), the new Future Urban Mobility IRG is focused on developing innovative mobility solutions that simultaneously tackle two opposing objectives:

• Improving the safety, comfort and time associated with transportation, getting individuals and good where they need to be, and when they need to be there; and

• Reversing the alarming, unsustainable energy and environmental trends associated with transportation, and devise transportation systems that materially enhance sustainability and societal well-being.

The approach taken is to achieve better utilization of the very expensive existing infrastructure, not simply to add capacity by building more roadways, guideways or highways. The project is structured around three research pillars:

• Networked computing and control
• Advanced transportation science models, optimization and simulations; and
• Performance assessment and implementation

The five-year project will be led by Amedeo Odoni, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, and engage some 30 other faculty and researchers from the School of Engineering, the Sloan School of Management, and the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.

Assisting their efforts will be approximately 25 faculty members from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and the Singapore Management University. This project will be a significant increase in the scale of transportation-related research conducted by MIT faculty and students.

Collaboration on this scale is remarkable—and absolutely necessary if we are going to address an issue as complex as urban transportation and mobility. When addressing issues today, especially those affecting the climate, it is not sufficient to take complex problems apart and merely investigate incremental improvements to their components.

This project will leave the challenges of transportation intact and try to address them all simultaneously. This new project will also benefit enormously from the Transportation@MIT initiative and Engineering School-wide faculty searches we launched earlier this year to create new opportunities to address major transportation challenges of this century.

—Subra Suresh, Dean of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at MIT

At the heart of the Singapore project is SimMobility, a simulation platform with an integrated model of human and commercial activities, land use, transportation, environmental impacts, and energy use. This simulation will be linked with a range of networked computing and control technology-enabled mobility innovations. The project’s researchers plan to use the data generated by these devices, and a range of new analytical tools that harness real-time information and management systems, to design and evaluate new mobility solutions for urban settings in and beyond Singapore.

The first three SMART efforts are in biosystems and micromechanics, environmental sensing and modeling, and infectious diseases. SMART is MIT’s largest international research endeavor and the first research center of its kind located outside Cambridge, Mass. Rohan Abeyaratne, the Quentin Berg Professor of Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is the current director of the SMART Centre.