A traffic simulation tool for assessing smart city policies (CitScale)

Over the last century, cities have developed as a function of increased usage of automobiles as the standard transport mode. The number of cars increased along with the population as highways and parking spots became essential in city planning. Now, there is more focus on how the existing infrastructure could be used as efficiently as possible rather than increasing capacity by merely building new roads. An important part of traffic planning is a sustainable transport system, which thereby reduces congestion and emissions by using the available capacity in a more efficient way. Traffic simulation models are tools for assessing new mobility solutions and analysing changes in the infrastructure, such as rearranging intersections and building new roads. Transportation is undergoing a profound and significant transformation as it seeks to fulfil the promise of connected mobility for people and goods while limiting its carbon footprint. Physical changes to the road network mean large investments that must be comprehensively considered before acting. Modelling different scenarios of infrastructural changes allows making forecasts without any physical changes. Autonomous vehicles are potentially changing the economics of ownership as well as the use of the transportation networks, which will likely accelerate trends towards greater use of app-based ride hailing and/or sharing by private transportation network companies. American and European cities are seeing a rise in several potential business models with varying degrees of ride sharing and public vs. private involvement in delivering mobility services (MaaS). Implications for transit agencies and mobility service providers must be evaluated, and this can be done by traffic simulation models that provide a model-based framework for evaluating the mobility impact of new services.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Crowd-sourced Photographic Content for Urban Recreational Route Planning

Routing services are able to provide travel directions for users of all modes of transport. Most of them are focusing on functional journeys (i.e. journeys linking given origin and destination with minimum cost) while paying less attention to recreational trips, in particular leisure walks in an urban context. These walks are additionally predefined by time or distance and as their purpose is the process of walking itself, the attractiveness of areas that are passed by can be an important factor in route selection. This factor is hard to be formalised and requires a reliable source of information, covering the entire street network. Previous research shows that crowd-sourced data available from photo-sharing services has a potential for being a measure of space attractiveness, thus becoming a base for a routing system that suggests leisure walks, and ongoing PhD research aims to build such system. This paper demonstrates findings on four investigated data sources (Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa and Geograph) in Central London and discusses the requirements to the algorithm that is going to be implemented in the second half of this PhD research. Visual analytics was chosen as a method for understanding and comparing obtained datasets that contain hundreds of thousands records. Interactive software was developed to find a number of problems, as well as to estimate the suitability of the sources in general. It was concluded that Picasa and Geograph have problems making them less suitable for further research while Panoramio and Flickr require filtering to remove photographs that do not contribute to understanding of local attractiveness. Based on this analysis a number of filtering methods were proposed in order to improve the quality of datasets and thus provide a more reliable measure to support urban recreational routing

Rapid prototyping and fast user trial of multimedia broadcast and cellular services

This paper presents the results of fast user trial of multimedia services that are enabled when a mobile terminal has access to converged services over digital broadcast and mobile telecommunications networks. It first describes the motivations behind developing this system and describes the service scenarios that benefit most from it. It then provides an overview of the service components of the test case scenario. Finally, it presents the results of fast user trials on end users of the services that were developed. This work was conducted as part of the EU-funded CISMUNDUS project

Requirements for Topology in 3D GIS

Topology and its various benefits are well understood within the context of 2D Geographical Information Systems. However, requirements in three-dimensional (3D) applications have yet to be defined, with factors such as lack of users' familiarity with the potential of such systems impeding this process. In this paper, we identify and review a number of requirements for topology in 3D applications. The review utilises existing topological frameworks and data models as a starting point. Three key areas were studied for the purposes of requirements identification, namely existing 2D topological systems, requirements for visualisation in 3D and requirements for 3D analysis supported by topology. This was followed by analysis of application areas such as earth sciences and urban modelling which are traditionally associated with GIS, as well as others including medical, biological and chemical science. Requirements for topological functionality in 3D were then grouped and categorised. The paper concludes by suggesting that these requirements can be used as a basis for the implementation of topology in 3D. It is the aim of this review to serve as a focus for further discussion and identification of additional applications that would benefit from 3D topology. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd