13,921 research outputs found
Product service systems in the automotive industry: An alternative business model for a sustainable satisfaction system
Copyright @ 2008 Brunel UniversityThe paper presents the intermediate results of an on-going research project called Vehicle Design Summit (VDS), run by an international Consortium of Universities coordinated by the MIT of Boston. The project aims at designing and prototyping an eco-efficient vehicle as well as defining an innovative and sustainable business model to introduce and diffuse it into the mobility sector. In this framework the paper explores the potential contribution that PSSs can have in moving beyond incremental technological improvements towards system innovation in the automotive industry. This is outlined presenting and discussing an alternative business model, characterized by: an approach to mobility as the scope of design; an innovative stakeholders network; a shift from selling products to selling results; a change in product ownership; and a consequent change in vehicle design
Mapping Accessibility Over Time
The concept of "accessibility" has been coin in the transportation planning field for more than 40 years. Improving accessibility is a common element in the goals section in almost all transportation plans in the US. In this study we compare the changes in levels of accessibility over time in the Minneapolis - St. Paul region using two different modes (auto and transit). The importance of accessibility as a measure of land use and transportation planning performance in the region is revealed by comparing it over time. The longitudinal analysis being conducted shows improvements in most areas in the studied region in terms of the level of accessibility by automobile, and a drop in accessibility by transit over the period 1990 to 2000. The findings are compared to the levels of congestion in the region between the same time periods. This comparison shows the difference between the two measures and strengthens the importance of accessibility measures as a tool for monitoring and evaluating regional land use and transportation planning performance. Journal of Maps (in press).
Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data
Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental
planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial
applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such
purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However,
our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial
enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work
contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant
commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for
mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations,
articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study
within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these
were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of
mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and
transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held
notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the
behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based
services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and
data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and
also follow best-practice
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