A Critical Perspective and Inclusive Analysis of Sustainable Road Infrastructure Literature

In response to the important environmental impacts produced by the road transport network during all its life cycle stages, a set of measurements to include sustainable principles have been identified between 1997–2021, analysed and mapped by applying SciMAT and VOSviewer. The results have shown the predominance of issues which analyse the life cycle assessment of road infrastructures in its both environmental and economic dimension as a way to mitigate their effects on climate change, including the reduction of resources and energy consumption, or of energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions during the construction and operation stages, respectively. However, the incorporation of the social life cycle assessment dimension, their adaptation to climate change, and the use of smart roads are still in an early stage. Therefore, efforts to include these issues are necessary to address their design according to the resilience concept and ensuring a cleaner and more competitive and climate-neutral Europe.Spanish Government PRX21-0029

Advances and challenges in the automotive industry: driving towards sustainable mobility

The digital transformation of the automobile industry linked with the new challenges of sustainable mobility, is generating important changes in the business models of automobile groups. The constant efforts to innovate in its vehicles and offer services associated with them are essential to guarantee its own sustainability. Automation, connectivity, electrification and shared mobility (ACES) are the four technological drivers of this sector and have been taken as a reference in this research to examine and learn how the main European automobile groups are addressing the global challenges associated with them. It is of special interest to offer this compilation of information that allows obtaining a current and well-founded vision of the advances in the sector, giving visibility to the commitment, effort and performance that these companies are carrying out. Likewise, the results obtained show different levels of integration and progress of the ACES factors in the automobile companies studied

Contributions to sustainable urban transport : decision support for alternative mobility and logistics concepts

Increasing transport activities in cities are a substantial driver for congestion and pollution, influencing urban populations’ health and quality of life. These effects are consequences of ongoing urbanization in combination with rising individual demand for mobility, goods, and services. With the goal of increased environmental sustainability in urban areas, city authorities and politics aim for reduced traffic and minimized transport emissions. To support more efficient and sustainable urban transport, this cumulative dissertation focuses on alternative transport concepts. For this purpose, scientific methods and models of the interdisciplinary information systems domain combined with elements of operations research, transportation, and logistics are developed and investigated in multiple research contributions. Different transport concepts are examined in terms of optimization and acceptance to provide decision support for relevant stakeholders. In more detail, the overarching topic of urban transport in this dissertation is divided into the complexes urban mobility (part A) in terms of passenger transport and urban logistics (part B) with a focus on the delivery of goods and services. Within part A, approaches to carsharing optimization are presented at various planning levels. Furthermore, the user acceptance of ridepooling is investigated. Part B outlines several optimization models for alternative urban parcel and e-grocery delivery concepts by proposing different network structures and transport vehicles. Conducted surveys on intentional use of urban logistics concepts give valuable hints to providers and decision makers. The introduced approaches with their corresponding results provide target-oriented support to facilitate decision making based on quantitative data. Due to the continuous growth of urban transport, the relevance of decision support in this regard, but also the understanding of the key drivers for people to use certain services will further increase in the future. By providing decision support for urban mobility as well as urban logistics concepts, this dissertation contributes to enhanced economic, social, and environmental sustainability in urban areas

Comparative Study of Business Models of European Micro-Mobility Online Services

The sharing economy is promoting sustainable usage of materials, equipment, and tools. Moreover, ride-sharing is a recognized means of sustainable mobility. Besides, in the wake of COVID-19 prevention measures, bicycles and e-scooters became encouraged transportation means to allow individual and non-crowded outdoor transit compared to other public transportation means. In this study, the authors aim to identify the core differentiating aspects of business models of European micro-mobility sharing online services (platforms). The Business Model Canvas framework proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) was used as a basis to carry out the comparative analysis. The most popular European micro-mobility services were identified using the Crunchbase database, and the data on their business models was collected from secondary sources. The paper presents an analysis of four cases: Bolt (an international ride-hailing service), Nextbike (international bike-sharing service), CityBee (regional freefloating car-sharing service), and TIER Mobility (regional scooter sharing service). Future research will include a broader range of cases, interviews of the micro-mobility platform’s representatives, surveys of their users, and more detailed case analysis

Bicycle helmet use and non-use – recently published research

Bicycle traumata are very common and especially neurologic complications lead to disability and death in all stages of the life. This review assembles the most recent findings concerning research in the field of bicycle traumata combined with the factor of bicycle helmet use. The area of bicycle trauma research is by nature multidisciplinary and relevant not only for physicians but also for experts with educational, engineering, judicial, rehabilitative or public health functions. Due to this plurality of global publications and special subjects, short time reviews help to detect recent research directions and provide also information from neighbour disciplines for researchers. It can be stated that to date, that although a huge amount of research has been conducted in this area more studies are needed to evaluate and improve special conditions and needs in different regions, ages, nationalities and to create successful prevention programs of severe head and face injuries while cycling. Focus was explicit the bicycle helmet use, wherefore sledding, ski and snowboard studies were excluded and only one study concerning electric bicycles remained due to similar motion structures within this review. The considered studies were all published between January 2010 and August 2011 and were identified via the online databases Medline PubMed and ISI Web of Science

Bibliometric analysis of nearly a decade of research in electric vehicles: a dynamic approach

A bibliometric study was developed based publications of investigation in electric vehicle from 2007 to 2016 available in the science citation Index-expanded database from Web of science, the information was identified in the version on line of SCI-Expanded, Web Thomson Reuters of Science, supported in addition on a powerful tools of information processing like Hitscite. The extracted files were analyzed to determine the number of citations, including publications by year, language, country or region, Journals, articles and authors in order to determine the evolution of this field of study

A bibliometric review and analysis of traffic lights optimization

The significant increase in the number of vehicles in urban areas emerges the challenge of urban mobility. Researchers in this area suggest that most daily delays in urban travel times are caused by intersections, which could be reduced if the traffic lights at these intersections were more efficient. The use of simulation for real intersections can be effective in optimizing the cycle times and improving the traffic light timing to coordinate vehicles passing through intersections. From these themes emerge the research questions: How are the existing approaches (optimization techniques and simulation) to managing traffic lights smartly? What kind of data (offline and online) are used for traffic lights optimization? How beneficial is it to propose an optimization approach to the traffic system? This paper aims to answer these questions, carried out through a bibliometric literature review. In total, 93 articles were analyzed. The main findings revealed that the United States and China are the countries with the most studies published in the last ten years. Moreover, Particle Swarm Optimization is a frequently used approach, and there is a tendency for studies to perform optimization of real cases by real-time data, showing that the praxis of smart cities has resorted to smart traffic lights.This work has been supported by FCT— Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020 and the project “Integrated and Innovative Solutions for the well-being of people in complex urban centers” within the Project Scope NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000086