BISITE Group promotes sustainable mobility through digital tokens

The BISITE Research Group of the University of Salamanca has achieved funding from the Ministry of Science and Innovation to work on the development of the proof of concept of ActivEdgeMobile (Promoting Active Mobility through Digital Tokens, Edge Computing and Multi-Agent Systems - PDC2022-133161-C32), which will apply the results obtained in the InEDGEMobility project (Towards Sustainable Intelligent Mobility Supported by Multi-Agent Systems and Edge Computing - RTI2018-095390-B).

The InEDGEMobility project is aimed at investigating ICT services that facilitate the transition to a more sustainable mobility model. Through ActivEdgeMobile, the goal now is to develop and validate a solution aimed at promoting active - and thus healthy - mobility that is also environmentally sustainable. The solution aims to make use of technologies such as Internet of Things, Edge Computing, green digital tokens based on Distributed Ledger Technologies, recommender systems, Virtual Agent Organizations and Agreement Technologies.

Technologies to promote sustainable mobility

The optimization of current resources has become an area of great interest for both the public and private transportation sector. For example, mobility systems, such as bike rental or car sharing systems, have been proposed as a solution to reducing the number of existing vehicles and traffic, and as a means of contributing to a cleaner environment.

Despite their advantages, car sharing systems also pose other problems that need to be addressed. To give an example, one of the problems of car sharing systems is the distribution of vehicles over time, creating some areas that have the highest number of vehicles, making parking very difficult, and some areas that have no vehicles, making it very difficult to borrow a vehicle in that location.

Likewise, physical activity plays an important role in the health of citizens in today's cities. Activities such as walking or cycling outdoors are two ways to promote physical activity. However, in cities it is not always easy to find safe and healthy routes (e.g., areas with low pollution, low noise, green areas, low traffic, safe, etc.) to perform these activities.

In this regard, promoting alternative modes of transport is essential; replacing polluting vehicles with ones that are cleaner and healthier, and at the same time involve more physical exercise, such as the use of bicycles. In view of this situation, both companies and public administrations are very interested in having tools that allow them to automatically promote activities geared towards citizens becoming more active in their mobility.

The media have echoed this excellent news for our group, as we report below: