City Pulse Captured for Real-Time Tripping

Feb. 11, 2008 -- Crowds. Traffic jams. Bus and train delays. Pollution. Life in the big city can sometimes bog you down.

Now for the first time, researchers are working on a dynamic, public transportation program that could improve your commute.

The CityMotion project, being coordinated through the MIT-Portugal Program, will capture a variety of real-time digital data already being produced or recorded for other reasons and re-purpose it to enhance mobility in Lisbon and Porto.

Such a system could help make planning the best route easier for a range of people from city officials to disaster evacuation planners to supply-chain managers to average commuters.

The first application will be a customized trip planner in which citizens can choose their journey based on the quickest, cheapest or most environmentally friendly path possible.

"Every few minutes, we get a big chunk of data that says, 'at this point in the city there are this many people.' It's a method of sensing the city," explained Assaf Biderman, assistant director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Biderman and colleagues at MIT have teamed up with researchers at the University of Porto, the University of Coimbra and the Instituto Superior Tecnico as part of the program's three-year timeline.

To sense congestion information in the cities, Biderman and his colleagues will pull data from sensors already distributed throughout a city.

For example, highways already have roadside sensors that regularly record the passing of cars. Tollbooths are able to calculate the number of cars passing through, based on vehicles using radio frequency identification tags for automatic payments. Location information about bus, subways and trains is already captured by public transportation authorities to manage schedules.

And many cities already have a network of pollution sensors distributed throughout neighborhoods to monitor air quality.