Smart school routing problem for the new normality

Abstract

The Smart Mobility Plan in Monterrey’s metropolitan area seeks to generate mobility strategies for the city that are sustainable and make dynamic use of data (with the support of ICTs). This initiative aims to improve the mobility in the region's universities and their surrounding zones as pilot tests and then scale them to larger city districts or to other schools around the world. As part of the university mobility plans, universities such as Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM), offers dedicated transportation services to its community (i.e. students and employees). However, recent studies show a low utilization of this service. This problem gets worse by the drastic social behavior changes caused by the COVID19 pandemic and the decreased service capacity in response to the healthy distance constraints, on the eve of back to school under the new normality. The methodology followed in this work is Intervention Scientific Research, according to its Classic classification, implementing the Hypothetic-Deductive Method. This project uses UDEM university as a case study to develop a comprehensive mobility proposal for school routes within the new normality’s operational conditions, such as potential demand increase, capacity decrease, demand patterns change, and real-time demand information.