Geosmartness for Personalized and Sustainable Future Urban Mobility

Abstract

Urban mobility and the transport of people have been increasing in volume inexorably for decades. Despite the advantages and opportunities mobility has brought to our society, there are also severe drawbacks such as the transport sector’s role as one of the main contributors to greenhouse-gas emissions and traffic jams. In the future, an increasing number of people will be living in large urban settings, and therefore, these problems must be solved to assure livable environments. The rapid progress of information and communication, and geographic information technologies, has paved the way for urban informatics and smart cities, which allow for large-scale urban analytics as well as supporting people in their complex mobile decision making. This chapter demonstrates how geosmartness, a combination of novel spatial-data sources, computational methods, and geospatial technologies, provides opportunities for scientists to perform large-scale spatio-temporal analyses of mobility patterns as well as to investigate people’s mobile decision making. Mobility-pattern analysis is necessary for evaluating real-time situations and for making predictions regarding future states. These analyses can also help detect behavioral changes, such as the impact of people’s travel habits or novel travel options, possibly leading to more sustainable forms of transport. Mobile technologies provide novel ways of user support. Examples cover movement-data analysis within the context of multi-modal and energy-efficient mobility, as well as mobile decision-making support through gaze-based interaction.