Solve spatial issues around mobility

How do people move from place to place? And when do they do it? Where do they go? Answers to these questions are needed to be able for effective urban planning. Mobility and traffic are tools for urban planners whose tasks include monitoring the mobility patters of people. 

At TU/e we develop professional computer models that simulate the way people move through public areas, with or without a vehicle, so that this information can be used to develop policy on spatial planning, urbanization, energy, public transport, network building and traffic congestion.

Supplementing a model with the use of information and communication systems can generate travel data that people then use this, in turn, has an effect on the mobility. A relatively new area of model development is to optimize the impact of information and model the response of travelers to recommendations. This takes us along the route towards intelligent navigation systems that use these plans to advise the user and the traffic about whether the user should first do the shopping, for instance, or post a package. Depending on how the user responds to the recommendation, the advice may then be modified once more.

This research is generated in the research group Design and Decision Support Systems by Prof. dr. Harry Timmermans in the Built Environment Department.