NEXT4MOB NEXT GENERATION TOOLS FOR ADVANCED MOBILITY SOLUTIONS

Cities and metropolitan areas must confront the challenges of rapidly increasing urbanization and mobility needs, including the emergence of new transport solutions (e.g., individual electric devices, shared transport, mobility-as-a- services applications, etc.). Under this context, it is required data-driven tools that can respond to these changing dynamics in a timely fashion and ensure the long-term alignment of transport innovations and urban systems. To address that, Next4Mob aims to build the basis for the next generation of quantitative tools, called digital twins, which advance the state-of-the-art in transport modelling by including citizens’ stated preferences in the model decision simulations and that will bridge the conceptual elegance of the approach with the practicalities of implementation in real practice. The city of Valladolid (Spain) will provide the empirical focus, where there is the urgent intention of implementing a Low Emission Zone that will serve as pilot case for this proposal. The implementation of Next4Mob will be done by a multidisciplinary consortium that combine three top-level research institutes from Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the Centre for Transport Research (TRANSyT) at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Sum+Lab research group on Transport at the Universidad de Cantabria, and the Valladolid Public Transport Company (AUVASA).