This project helped in addressing the emerging need for a modern conceptualization of urban mobility and urban activities including networked interactions between cities and citizens through analogies that are derived from network flows, data processing, and causality analysis. In essence, urban mobility is a multidimensional characteristic of cities, experienced as layers of interconnected infrastructures, places, people, and information. Similarly, emergency resilience is also mostly considered as a single dimension attribute of a system although it has a multi-domain nature. However, both the study of mobility and resilience should examine all infrastructure systems, weather and environment and information networks. As such, the project developed two novel concepts, namely “co-mobility” and “co-resilience” in order to characterize the mobility and resilience in a spatio-temporal and multi-network scheme, respectively. This characterization provides a unified data-driven mathematical foundation for urban mobility and resilience management.

This foundation was supported by assessing citizens’ perceptions of smart city apps as well as several motivations and barriers that predicted citizens’ intentions to adopt and use smart city apps to report problems such as power outages and roadway blockages. Through a qualitative focus group study and a quantitative survey with a diverse pool of participants of various age groups and socio-economic status as well as city experts, these motivations and challenges were analyzed extensively. Findings indicated the facilitating features (e.g., convenience, ease of use) that drive the adoption of smart city app usage as well as barriers (e.g., privacy concerns, unwanted notifications) that might hinder their adoption and continued usage. As much as the concept of smart city technology is exciting and promising, findings indicate that developers and city governments need to promote smart city app benefits and address barriers before their full potential to improve a city can be realized.    

The research team hopes the assimilation of the findings of this project will provide municipal utilities with a new way to use information to help them better predict the fluctuating power needs of their community and recognize opportunities to improve traffic flow. By helping municipal utilities adopt strategies to help them become more efficient in providing power to residents, this will ultimately lower costs and provide a better experience for their community. The developed models also show potential for improvement in emergency resilience. Researchers hope the knowledge of the co-resilience approach will help emergency agencies and other relevant departments accurately predict high risk locations with respect to fallen trees, power outages and roadway closures.

Findings from the survey also indicated that citizens used a variety of channels (e.g., phone, web site, e-mail, smart city app) in order to report problems they experienced (e.g., power outage or blocked roadway) during and after two hurricanes. Importantly, citizens’ satisfaction with the local government’s response to their reported problems was dependent on the channel they used to report the problem/s. These findings can be used by Florida and its communities to develop better crisis communication and storm-emergency plans that fit the diverse needs of the populations and allow for less-stressful evacuations, assist with effective sheltering and, ultimately, save lives.

City governments and communities were engaged through meetings where appropriate, allowing expert and public perspective and perception on the findings of this research. In order to maximize the educational impact of the project, the research team actively engaged high school students through FSU’s Young Scholars Program as well as undergraduate and graduate students from multiple disciplines (civil engineering, electrical engineering, and communications) in data analysis and modeling. This research exposed these students to many mobility and resilience issues, which range from accessibility and safety to information dissemination to public and resilience of infrastructure networks. These activities led to research publications which were published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at conferences such as Transportation Research Board (TRB), National Communication Association (NCA) and IEEE conferences.

Last Modified: 04/22/2019
Modified by: Eren E Ozguven