Renewable Mobility in Smart Cities:TheMOVESMART Approach

Abstract

The provision of efficient, sustainable, and personalized mobility services that combine a broad range of transport modes (e.g., public transportation, electric vehicles (EVs), vehicle sharing) constitutes a fundamental challenge in urban environments. This chapter reports on the key results and contributions of the EU-funded research project MOVESMART which addresses the aforementioned challenge. MOVESMART proposes a holistic approach as regards renewable mobility services in smart cities. The MOVESMART approach involves personal mobility services, leverages crowdsourcing techniques for collecting real-time traffic information, and encompasses effective traffic prediction mechanisms. MOVESMART guarantees real-time responses to renewable (on-demand) mobility queries for efficient multimodal route planning that are time-dependent as well as sensitive to aperiodic incidents and traffic prediction forecasts. The core architectural element of MOVESMART is a hierarchical urban traffic infrastructure maintained in a cloud infrastructure. A key outcome of MOVESMART is the design and implementation of novel renewable mobility services which incorporate eco-friendly modes of transport, most notably (shared) electric vehicles. The project delivers a set of innovative cloud-based mobility services; those are delivered through an integrated mobile application which offers a holistic view of renewable mobility incorporating a personalized time-dependent multimodal route-planning service along with EV-sharing and energy efficiency assessment.