This NSF Smart and Connected Communities Integrative Research Grant (SCC-IRG) aims to address important equity and system integration challenges in mobility systems that could directly affect individual users' quality of life and access to critical services and employment opportunities. Results from this project will support the improvement of metropolitan areas broadly and the San Diego region specifically by exploiting emerging technologies and the public policy levers these technologies engender. The research team will work with transportation modelers and planners at the San Diego Association of Governments to develop a substantially improved decision support system for regional planning and investment decisions that could lead to more equitable, sustainable, and resilient future mobility system, such as solutions that could better connect people, especially disadvantaged populations, to jobs, healthcare, groceries, and other activities. The project also presents education and outreach opportunities to train next-generation engineers and practitioners in an integrated and multi-disciplinary research environment and broaden participation in STEM field.

To address socio-technical challenges related to equitable mobility, accessibility, and environmental sustainability, the research team will implement targeted improvements to regional transportation system models in the short term and fundamentally revamp regional transportation system models in the long run. To improve the models in the short run, the research team will develop flexible and detailed models of mobility-on-demand services, identify and develop equity metrics and equity analysis techniques, and develop low-resolution models for rapid analysis of potential policies. To fundamentally revamp regional models in the long run, the research team will develop a prescriptive (i.e., optimization-based) multi-level, multi-resolution, multi-objective pathway-based modeling framework to not only analyze but actually recommend combinations of transportation and land use policies and infrastructure investments over time. Moving from predictive to prescriptive modeling for regional transportation planning will represent a major theoretical contribution, as will incorporating equity into a multi-objective optimization problem formulation. Additionally, developing a multi-resolution modeling framework to support the bi-level, multi-objective prescriptive modeling framework will represent a valuable methodological contribution. Similarly, the new models provide sufficient flexibility to capture the important components of mobility-on-demand services and new technologies like connected automated vehicles thus represent an important methodological contribution that will speed the effective deployment of smart mobility solutions to address pressing social equity, sustainability, and economic challenges.