Research

Recent advance­ments in infor­ma­tion and vehic­u­lar tech­nolo­gies dri­ve the wave of inno­va­tions in mobil­i­ty ser­vices and sys­tems. The fig­ure on the right presents the time­line of key tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ments and the emer­gence of new mobil­i­ty ser­vices, and shows how the lat­ter fol­lows the for­mer. Specif­i­cal­ly, the num­ber of smart mobile devices in the US has been ris­ing steadi­ly. These devices retrieve users’ geolo­ca­tions, enable ubiq­ui­tous com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and allow instant peer-to-peer inter­ac­tion, giv­ing rise to var­i­ous on-demand mobil­i­ty ser­vices for goods and peo­ple, which bring togeth­er sup­pli­ers of resources (e.g., car and park­ing space) and ser­vices (e.g., ride and park­ing) with very low trans­ac­tion costs. Con­nect­ed and auto­mat­ed vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy will fur­ther rev­o­lu­tion­ize urban and rur­al mobil­i­ty and pro­mote the shift from car own­er­ship to sharing/subscription. Auto­mat­ed shared-use mobil­i­ty ser­vices may even­tu­al­ly emerge where com­pa­nies own a fleet of dif­fer­ent types of auto­mat­ed vehi­cles and offer on-demand ride hail­ing ser­vices. Oth­er types of mobil­i­ty ser­vices will be like­ly cat­alyzed by new busi­ness mod­els and ven­ture cap­i­tal investments.

These mobil­i­ty ser­vices are expect­ed to play an increas­ing­ly impor­tant role in meet­ing mobil­i­ty needs. It is crit­i­cal to under­stand the impacts and impli­ca­tions of these ser­vices and pro­vide guid­ance on their devel­op­ment and deploy­ment. LIMOS con­ducts quan­ti­ta­tive analy­ses and devel­ops nov­el mod­els and tools to under­stand, plan, design, and reg­u­late emerg­ing mobil­i­ty ser­vices to enable them to be inte­gral com­po­nents of trans­porta­tion sys­tems and improve sys­tem con­nec­tions and inte­gra­tion. Below we high­light select­ed LIMOS research projects towards con­nect­ed, auto­mat­ed, shared and elec­tri­fied (CASE) mobil­i­ty.