Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Mobility infrastructure with transportation services is the backbone in livable cities, remote and rural areas. Emerging mobility infrastructure is growing rapidly with services such as autonomous vehicles, electrical buses, on-demand ride-hailing and vehicle sharing, to form integrated mobility systems. Such integration revolutionizes conventional mobility, reshapes travel behaviors, and transforms inflexible options into more dynamic and multimodal services for travelers, especially for remote communities and underrepresented groups who are more constrained by specific traditional mobility service (e.g., transit or private car). However, it is unclear what types and values of benefits and how those benefits can be materialized from the emerging mobility infrastructure in a cost-efficient way for both urban and rural areas. Autonomous vehicles, shared mobility and connectivity are upon us, but the approaches to date do not yet have sufficient theory, tractable models and long-term guidance to satisfy inclusive public goals. The research program will pioneer and develop the theories and models, and examine them to explain the multimodal interactions, predict travel behavior and ridership, and quantify the costs and benefits for integrating emerging mobility infrastructure at strategic, systematic, and tactical levels. Paradigms and applications are developed considering behavioral dynamics, endogenous interrelationships of mobility services, urban-rural characteristics and demand-supply interactions with a focus on connectivity, equitability and sustainability of communities. The program consists of three thematic research: (1) Behavior and Demand. Travel behaviors, individual preferences and mobility characteristics in the interrelated mobility infrastructure. (2) Supply and Networks. A scalable framework of network-wide supply optimizations considering interactions and multiple objectives. (3) Incentivization and Resilience. Designs of dynamic incentives responding to real-time traffic conditions. Interdisciplinary approaches will include discrete choice models, user equilibrium, mixed-integer nonlinear optimizations, and Pareto improvements. The concepts, methodology and interpretations to be developed and tested will foster the integration of emerging mobility infrastructure to provide affordable travels for individuals, create seamless network connectivity for communities and empower decision making process, which will benefit travelers, sectors and society as a whole. The program will yield theoretical models, methodological insights and applications in the transportation field to provide an informative and in-depth point of reference for researchers and stakeholders in transportation analysis and modeling. The interdisciplinary research will advance the state-of-the-art and also contribute on the theories and empirical studies to the field of behaviors, operation research, economics and management science.