Engaging the crowd in sensing for smart mobility: A discrete choice experiment

With rising numbers of people living in cities leading to increasing congestion and pollution, mobile crowdsensing applications form a potential solution to make transport systems smarter and more efficient. However, sharing data comes with the risk of private information being disclosed. Therefore, a clear incentive is necessary to motivate...

An Adaptive Battery Charging Method for the Electrification of Diesel or CNG Buses as In-Motion-Charging Trolleybuses

The decarbonization of urban bus fleets can be made by their electrification as in-motion-charging (IMC) buses which can run as trolleybuses or in battery mode. The benefit is that IMC buses can use the existing trolleygrid infrastructure where their route overlaps with it to charge the battery and operate in battery mode outside of it....

Routing of Heterogeneous Fleets for Flash Deliveries via Vehicle Group Assignment

This paper presents a novel approach to route heterogeneous fleets for flash delivery operations. Flash deliveries offer to serve customers' wishes in minutes. We investigate a scenario that allows to pick up orders at multiple depots with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet leveraging different modes of transportation. We propose the Heterogeneous...

An urban drought categorization framework and the vulnerability of a lowland city to groundwater urban droughts

Due to climate change, droughts will intensify in large parts of the world. Drought and its impacts on nature and agriculture have been studied thoroughly, but its effects on the urban environment is rather unexplored. But also the built environment is susceptible to droughts and estimation of its vulnerability is the first step to its...

Machine learning for spatial analyses in urban areas: a scoping review

The challenges for sustainable cities to protect the environment, ensure economic growth, and maintain social justice have been widely recognized. Along with the digitization, availability of large datasets, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are promising to revolutionize the way we analyze and plan urban areas, opening new...

Requirements for Location-based Games for Social Interaction

Social interaction is part of the fabric of society and is essential to challenge many types of social barriers. Location-based games (LBGs) provide a means to foster such interaction in local communities. The design of such games is currently based primarily on designer experience and on the literature on game design in general, and not on...

An Approach to Map Visibility in The Built Environment from Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds

Sustainable development can only be achieved with an innovative improvement from the way we currently analyze, design, build and manage our urban spaces. Current digital analysis and design methods for cities, such as visibility analysis, deeply rely on mapping and modeling techniques. However, most methods fall short of depicting the real...

Vulnerability of cities to soil moisture and groundwater droughts

Due to climate change, extreme phenomena like droughts are going to be intensified. Even though droughts in agriculture have been studied, regarding urban environment their consequences are rather unexplored. Cities are susceptible to droughts and the estimation of their vulnerability is the first step for their protection. The objective of this...

Stranded sustainable mobility initiatives: Lessons learned from cases in Amsterdam

Cities inhabit the most people per unit of land surface, and all these people have the need and desire to move around. On top of that, vast amounts of goods are transported into and within these cities. The extensive transportation of people and goods causes a negative influence on the environment and a transition to sustainable mobility is...

Small and medium sized enterprises’ construction logistics in urban areas: A framework to decrease the emissions caused by small-scale construction projects’ logistics in urban areas

The world is facing climate change which has sever impacts on extreme weather events, biodiversity and rising seas. Greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced to counteract climate change. One specific way to contribute to that reduction is setting Zero-Emission (ZE) zones to ban fossil fuel vehicles in urban areas which will presumably lead to...

District Heating Systems for Sustainable Heating in Metropolitan Areas: How the planning & design of district heating systems in metropolitan areas can support stakeholders in their transition towards sustainable heating

District heating systems offer great potential for facilitating the transition towards sustainable heating for metropolitan areas. This research provides an overview of roles and factors relevant to DH systems, identifies stakeholder types, their interests and influence, shows the relationship to system requirements and the lack of stakeholder...

Linking Persistent Scatterers to the Built Environment Using Ray Tracing on Urban Models

Persistent scatterers (PSs) are coherent measurement points obtained from time series of satellite radar images, which are used to detect and estimate millimeter-scale displacements of the terrain or man-made structures. However, associating these measurement points with specific physical objects is not straightforward, which hampers the...

The impact of ridesharing in mobility-on-demand systems: Simulation case study in Prague

In densely populated-cities, the use of private cars for personal transportation is unsustainable, due to high parking and road capacity requirements. The mobility-on-demand systems have been proposed as an alternative to a private car. Such systems consist of a fleet of vehicles that the user of the system can hail for one-way point-to-point...

A columnar architecture for modern risk management systems

3D digital city models form the basis for flow simulations (e.g. wind flow and water runoff), urban planning, underand over- ground formation analysis, and they are very important for automated anomaly detection on man made structures. They consist of large collections of semantically rich objects which have many properties such as material and...