TRCLC 18-01
Sustainable and Smart-growth City Ranking: Multifaceted Transportation Performance Measures in Smart Cities
PIs: Jun-Seok Oh, Valerian Kwigizile, Ahmad Feizi Western Michigan University
Summary:
The concept of smart city is fast becoming a key instrument in transforming living environments in a way better to enhance operational efficiency of a transportation system. To the best of our knowledge, there is no standard or constraint guideline to evaluate the constitutes of a transportation system in smart cities and previous studies are limited by number of indicators or data availability. This study was to propose a comprehensive framework to integrate and evaluate transportation performance measures in smart and sustainable cities.
Problem:
Previous studies focused on specific indicators to evaluate the smart-ness and sustainability of transportation systems in such a way that other indicators have been disregarded. In addition, some of the reviewed frameworks need access to various types of data that is not always achievable for all study areas. Therefore, a framework that takes desired components of smart and sustainable city into the consideration is required. This study, then, will develop a permissive framework to integrate such components, traffic safety, air quality, active transportation, and network performance, through publicly available datasets and explicit algorithm. The output of the study will provide decision-maker a ranking-based evaluation to have a better insight on sustainability and smart-growth of a numerous sets of cities.
Research method:
This study identifies a framework to assess transportation performance measures and smart-growth of cities around the U.S. The proposed assessment framework is comprised of the evaluation of individual criterion and the assessment of comprehensive results. The criteria are categorized into four groups including network performance, traffic safety, environmental impact, and physical activity. This study provides a multifaceted approach to integrate the criteria’s performance measures. As a case example, the proposed performance measures were examined for forty-six cities in the U.S. and the required data were gathered from multiple sources. A multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method was employed to integrate and evaluate the score associated with each city. The output of the framework contains a sustainable and smart-growth ranking of the selected cities as well as uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. The sensitivity analysis was utilized to determine the quantity that each performance measure or weighting factor requires to alter the smart-growth score.
Findings:
It has been illustrated that the dominancy between reversible pairs in the ranking are critically sensitive for almost 15% of cases. The results of the proposed framework can be an effective decision supporting tool in analyzing traffic management strategies. Results from the score sensitivity calculation indicate that the proposed framework can be adopted in multifaceted transportation system performance in sustainable and smart-growth of cities. The results of the proposed framework can be an effective decision supporting tool in analyzing traffic management strategies. Results from the score sensitivity calculation indicate that the proposed framework can be adopted in multifaceted transportation system performance in sustainability and smart-growth of cities.