Smart-Mobility Services for Climate Mitigation in Urban Areas: Case Studies of Baltic Countries and Germany

Goal-oriented possibilistic fuzzy C-Medoid clustering of human mobility patterns—Illustrative application for the Taxicab trips-based enrichment of public transport services

The discovery of human mobility patterns of cities provides invaluable information for decision-makers who are responsible for redesign of community spaces, traffic, and public transportation systems and building more sustainable cities. The present article proposes a possibilistic fuzzy c-medoid clustering algorithm to study human mobility. The proposed medoid-based clustering approach groups the typical mobility patterns within walking distance to the stations of the public transportation system. The departure times of the clustered trips are also taken into account to obtain recommendations for the scheduling of the designed public transportation lines. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is revealed in an illustrative case study based on the analysis of the GPS data of Taxicabs recorded during nights over a one-year-long period in Budapest.

Bike-Sharing Adoption in Cross-National Contexts: An Empirical Research on the Factors Affecting Users’ Intentions

Due to the need to promote a larger scale of low-carbon commuting, it is important to identify the influencing factors of the users’ intentions in the adoption of sharing bikes. For studying bike-sharing adoption in cross-national contexts, this research establishes a new model. By conducting multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM), the influencing factors of the adoption in China and Estonia are identified, respectively. Meanwhile, the moderation effects of the national context on several influencing factors are confirmed, and this result indicates that the contexts for bike-sharing adoption are different in the two countries. Two factors have also been found, namely the availability of infrastructure and the beneficial cost, for which policy interventions could have a significant impact in China but not in Estonia. Thus, more active policy interventions might lead to a higher level of adoption intention for the Chinese. This finding provides the implication that implementing policy interventions could be critical for accelerating the adoption of bike sharing and promoting low-carbon commuting.

IoT-Enabled Smart Cities: A Review of Concepts, Frameworks and Key Technologies

In recent years, smart cities have been significantly developed and have greatly expanded their potential. In fact, novel advancements to the Internet of things (IoT) have paved the way for new possibilities, representing a set of key enabling technologies for smart cities and allowing the production and automation of innovative services and advanced applications for the different city stakeholders. This paper presents a review of the research literature on IoT-enabled smart cities, with the aim of highlighting the main trends and open challenges of adopting IoT technologies for the development of sustainable and efficient smart cities. This work first provides a survey on the key technologies proposed in the literature for the implementation of IoT frameworks, and then a review of the main smart city approaches and frameworks, based on classification into eight domains, which extends the traditional six domain classification that is typically adopted in most of the related works.

A Computer Tool Using OpenModelica for Modelling CO2 Emissions in Driving Tests

The transport sector is one of the main barriers to achieving the European Union’s climate protection objectives. Therefore, more and more restrictive legal regulations are being introduced, setting out permissible limits for the emission of toxic substances emitted into the atmosphere, promoted biofuels and electromobility. The manuscript presents a computer tool to model the total energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of vehicles with an internal combustion engine of a 2018 Toyota Camry LE. The calculation tool is designed in the OpenModelica environment. Libraries were used for this purpose to build models of vehicles in motion: VehicleInterfaces, EMOTH (E-Mobility Library of OTH Regensburg). The tool developed on the basis of actual driving test data for the selected vehicle provides quantitative models for the instantaneous value of the fuel stream, the model of the instantaneous value of the carbon dioxide emission stream as a function of speed and the torque generated by the engine. In the manuscript, the tests were conducted for selected driving cycles tests: UDDS (EPA Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule), HWFET (Highway Fuel Economy Driving Schedule), EPA US06 (Environmental Protection Agency; Supplemental Federal Test Procedure (SFTP)), LA-92 (Los Angeles 1992 driving schedule), NEDC (New European Driving Cycle), and WLTP (Worldwide Harmonized Light-Duty Vehicle Test Procedure). Using the developed computer tool, the impact on CO2 emissions was analyzed in the context of driving tests with four types of fuels: petrol 95, ethanol, methanol, DME (dimethyl ether), CNG (compressed natural gas), and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas).

Smart Recommendations for Renting Bikes in Bike-Sharing Systems

Vehicle-sharing systems—such as bike-, car-, or motorcycle-sharing systems—have become increasingly popular in big cities in recent years. On the one hand, they provide a cheaper and environmentally friendlier means of transportation than private cars, and on the other hand, they satisfy the individual mobility demands of citizens better than traditional public transport systems. One of their advantages in this regard is their availability, e.g., the possibility of taking (or leaving) a vehicle almost anywhere in a city. This availability obviously depends on different strategic and operational management decisions and policies, such as the dimension of the fleet or the (re)distribution of vehicles. Agglutination problems—where, due to usage patterns, available vehicles are concentrated in certain areas, whereas no vehicles are available in others—are quite common in such systems, and need to be dealt with. Research has been dedicated to this problem, specifying different techniques to reduce imbalanced situations. In this paper, we present and compare strategies for recommending stations to users who wish to rent or return bikes in station-based bike-sharing systems. Our first contribution is a novel recommendation strategy based on queuing theory that recommends stations based on their utility to the user in terms of lower distance and higher probability of finding a bike or slot. Then, we go one step further, defining a strategy that recommends stations by combining the utility of a particular user with the utility of the global system, measured in terms of the improvement in the distribution of bikes and slots with respect to the expected future demand, with the aim of implicitly avoiding or alleviating balancing problems. We present several experiments to evaluate our proposal with real data from the bike sharing system BiciMAD in Madrid.

Digital Technologies for Urban Metabolism Efficiency: Lessons from Urban Agenda Partnership on Circular Economy

Digital technologies engaged in urban metabolism for efficiency provide policymakers, urban managers, and planners with useful instruments to collect, monitor, analyze, and evaluate the circularity of environmental, social, and economic resources to improve their effectiveness and quality. At present, the digital technology-based approach is strategic for circular cities engaged in the development of smart and sustainable actions in the fields of mobility, energy, environment, waste, telecommunications, and security. Through the ‘Circular Resource Efficiency Management Framework’ developed by the European Commission, this paper generates insights into the digitalization practices of the circularity of urban metabolism by analyzing the initiatives implemented by the municipalities of Kaunas, Flanders region, Porto, Prato, The Hague, and Oslo, which constitute the Partnership on Circular Economy (PCE) of the Urban Agenda of the European Union. The results of the analysis provide a wide range of practices such as real-time monitoring stations for water and energy consumption, digital cameras for controlling vehicle flows, web platforms for sharing goods and services, and tracking sensors for public transport, which aim to optimize the efficiency of the circularity of urban metabolic flows. This study increases the understanding and awareness of digital technologies in this paradigm shift.