Course info

Urbanization leads to increased transport of people and goods in cities, which creates more complex traffic  systems where vehicles and vulnerable road users need to interact. This development has a substantial  societal, environmental and economic impact affecting people's safety and health (e.g. accidents, air  pollution) as well as transport efficiency (e.g. increased congestion). Investing in new physical infrastructure  is needed but is usually very expensive and cities need to find more cost effective ways to plan and  manage traffic. New digital and connected solutions based such as (CCAM) are being developed with a  potential to effectively reduce these issues. Cities are trying to figure out how these solutions can be used  and efficiently integrated into existing systems targeting challenges such as data management, governance  structuring, policy development, user acceptance, etc.  

 One of these technologies, regarded to have a major  role for various solutions within urban traffic planning and management is geofencing. The technology can  influence speed, powertrain and access control, and has the potential to become a powerful tool for cities in  creating and maintaining more sustainable and high-quality urban spaces for their citizens by increasing  traffic safety, lowering emissions, ensuring better traffic management, increasing the comfort of driving and  increase transport efficiency and mobility.

GeoSence elaborates on geofencing solutions aiming at improving traffic flow, safety and air quality. Challenges on how to obtain user acceptance and useful improvements are addressed. 

The project is the first of its kind investigating the implementation of  geofencing and its impact from a holistic perspective, working closely with local planning authorities. The overall objective of GeoSence is to design, trial and evaluate new geofencing concepts and solutions for specific cases in cities and to propose new ways on how to deploy different  geofencing applications.