AVENUE

AVENUE is an AI4Cities project that proposes to develop an AI-based decision support tool for designing and monitoring shared mobility regulatory frameworks oriented towards the reduction of GHG emissions.

The project

AVENUE is a part of AI4Cities, a three-year EU-funded program that brought together leading European cities looking for artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to accelerate carbon neutrality. Nommon and Populus joined forces to present AVENUE, a proposal in response to the mobility challenge.

AVENUE will develop an AI-based decision support tool that allows the monitoring and assessment of the carbon footprint impact of different shared mobility regulatory frameworks and policy strategies. The proposed solution will exploit the information provided by two existing solutions for collecting and leveraging geolocated big data: Populus’ Mobility Manager, which enables cities to gather, aggregate and analyse the data that mobility operators share with authorities to manage the enforcement of regulatory measures, and Nommon’s Mobility Analytics Solution, which processes the registers from mobile network data and other geolocated sources to provide actionable insights about people’s activity and mobility patterns. The combination of this information with other data sources available by cities will be used to develop demand prediction models capable of simulating the modal choice process around shared mobility services and the way these modal choices can be influenced by different regulatory strategies.

Goals

The outcome of these models will serve to evaluate the carbon footprint effects of different possible measures. The outputs will be provided via an API service, in order to add new indicators to the ones provided by Populus’s Mobility Manager when enforcing a given regulation or to interact with other tools used by cities.

AVENUE will also develop an interactive visualisation tool that will facilitate long-term decision-making processes about the implementation of smart mobility systems from a climate change mitigation perspective.

It is expected that the functionalities of the tool developed by Nommon and Populus and the results of the project will contribute to provide other benefits related to different areas of sustainability beyond the reduction of GHG emissions. For example, policies that address the carbon footprint of shared mobility services are likely to have a positive impact on other environmental aspects, such as energy consumption and air quality. Furthermore, a better understanding of the patterns of choice of transport modes will open the door to more detailed analyses about the social sustainability of smart mobility, including age and income influence on accessibility and the effects on vulnerable street users. Finally, AVENUE will facilitate evidence-based governance processes and collaboration between shared mobility operators and cities, fostering the adoption of the latest advancements in transport modelling thanks to a user-friendly approach and facilitating the communication of policy decisions to all concerned stakeholders.

Project phases

Phase 1: Solution Design

Nommon and Populus worked together in the AI4Cities’s Solution Design Phase. Both companies worked for three months on the design of the AVENUE solution, analysing the cities’ needs related to GHG emissions and shared mobility, and evaluated the different data sources available to feed the solution’s model.

Phase 2: Prototyping

AVENUE was selected to move forward to AI4Cities’ phase 2 to create the first prototype of the solution proposed in Phase 1. Nommon and Populus’ teams continued working on the development of the prototype until January 2022.

Phase 3: Testing

AVENUE was selected to proceed to Phase 3 of the project. The solution was piloted in two of the participant cities: Stavanger and Tallinn. This opportunity enabled the consortium to refine the functionalities of the tool and add new ones to help cities to more efficiently plan and manage shared mobility systems. In addition to the reduction of emissions indicators, the consortium worked on the development of use cases that allow, for example, the location of mobility hubs, the expansion of the system or the optimisation of no-parking zones. This phase allowed the tool to be tested in real conditions by end users, which provided very valuable insights.