Assessing the value of Intelligent Transport System for Smart Mobility: models and applications

Cities all over the world face similar issues regarding urban mobility (e.g. congestion, road safety, security, pollution, climate change due to CO2 emissions), all having a huge impact on the economy, the environment, the health and the quality of life of citizens. Information accuracy and decision-making speed are of paramount importance in managing today’s mobility of goods and people inside the city. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) can provide road users with updated information and forecasts on both traffic and weather conditions. The result is a higher efficiency in the use of resources and a better management of physical flows. This thesis is a collection of three papers, each of which addresses a specific objective: (i) to provide a clear understanding of the role of ITS for urban Smart Mobility, (ii) to provide a clear understanding of how ITS could impact on urban mobility considering both people and freight transport, quantifying the effects in terms of efficiency (time, costs), environmental footprint and payback time of the investment, and (iii) to provide an overview of the assessment of the mutual benefits related to the joint application of ITS for people and freight transport within the urban perimeter, verifying the entity of the combined benefits (e.g. additive, super-additive) in a smart urban context. To reach these objectives, a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies has been implemented: a literature review, simulation models and analytical models development. The first paper is a systematic literature review on the topic of ITS for urban Smart Mobility. It highlights the main topics addressed and the methods adopted, identifying the main literature gaps in order to propose directions for future research activities. The second article investigates, through a simulation and a quantitative assessment, how ITS could impact on urban road traffic considering both people and freight transport. The third article aims to illustrate, through a simulation and a quantitative assessment, how new ITS solutions may impact on urban parking management and to quantify the costs and the economic and social benefits that can be obtained. Future research direction, beyond this thesis, include the updating of the literature review, investigating in depth the new papers which will be published on this topic in the next years; the modelling of public transport flows (e.g. buses, trams) in the simulation models (these types of transport are very important within the urban mobility context and ITS could enable specific priority logics in order to reduce the traffic congestion); and, finally, the analysis of the state of the art and the benefits achievable by using the new ITS solutions which will become reality in the next years (e.g. autonomous vehicles) in order to understand the technological progress, in transport in particular.