Meeting #38 – Beyond Innovation in Transport Policy and Engineering

Our next session will be under the topic Beyond Innovation in Transport Policy and Engineering, by António Ferreira and Kim von Schönfeld.
This session will take place on Tuesday, 13th of May, at 11.30 a.m. in room G423 and will be chaired by Sérgio Pedro Duarte.

 

About the topic

Transport policies and engineering are being shaped by a fundamentally pro-innovation paradigm. This paradigm confuses the public interest with the implementation of novelties that in turn lead to efficiency, digitalisation, smart technologies and behavioural interventions geared towards economic growth. This workshop challenges the alignment of the supremacy of innovation with the public interest and invites participants to explore a more plural vision of change and continuity in transport policies and technologies.

Starting from a conceptual triangle with three vertices (innovation, maintenance and historical return) we will question how policy paradigms limit imagination and exclude relevant solutions. Through discussion and visual mapping exercises based on this triangular model, participants will explore a central question: How can we support initiatives free from pro-innovation ideological paradigms in order to better combine, in the name of the public interest, the historic, the current and the new?

This session welcomes researchers, professionals and policy-makers interested in rethinking the limits and benefits of innovation and promoting a more diverse, creative and resilient transport future.

 

António Ferreira is a Principal Researcher at CITTA – Centre for Research on Territory, Transports and Environment of the University of Porto, Portugal. He is a researcher with great curiosity for new topics and who has published on a variety of fields, ranging from urban and transport governance to planning education, from emotions in the workplace to mindfulness, from planning theory to economic appraisal. At the moment, his key research interests are focused on child-friendly futures and post-growth planning, the governance of the digital transition and of “smart” technologies. He is the Member n. 218 of the Portuguese Association of Urbanists.

 

Kim von Schönfeld is a researcher in the field of planning, and currently works as Marie Sklodowska‐Curie post‐doctoral research fellow at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), developing the MobileWorlds project about creative ways to reimagine mobilities of the future. She has worked mainly in the field of urban and regional planning, focusing on participatory and inclusive planning processes, and pathways towards inclusive and environmentally just planning outcomes. This has led her to study social learning, (social) innovation, degrowth/post-growth, cultural diversity, and several other subjects, often with special attention to contexts of transport and (im-)mobility planning. She is also a collaborating researcher at CITTA— Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment, University of Porto, Portugal.

 

 

Meeting #37 – Advancing Intermodal Mobility: Tools and Insights for a Sustainable Transport Future

GITMob meeting no. 37

This session will take place at FEUP, room L202A, on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

In this session, we will welcome Thiago Sobral from Optimização e Planeamento de Transporte (OPT), along with João Teixeira and Luísa Bastos Leite from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), for a deep dive into the increasingly relevant topic of intermodal mobility — a key enabler of more sustainable and seamless public transport systems. Professor Marta Campos Ferreira will moderate this session. The speakers will present ongoing research conducted within the scope of the Alliance for Energy Transition (ATE) Project, exploring the following areas:

  • Intermodal mobility behavior
  • Public transport planning and synchronization
  • The development of a Decision Support Platform for transport planners, operators, and authorities. This platform aims to optimize the synchronization of transport networks across Portugal, enhance the passenger experience, and advance the shift toward sustainable, green mobility.

The ATE Project aims to strengthen the competitiveness and resilience of companies through decarbonization, digitization, and decentralization of the Energy sector in Portugal. The consortium operates in 6 areas covering the entire value chain: i) decarbonization of the energy sector, ii) reindustrialization and circular use of resources, iii) digitization of the energy sector, iv) decentralization and democratization of energy, v) sustainable mobility and industry, vi) capacity building and business acceleration. As a result of creating innovative and export-oriented solutions, Portugal aims to position itself as a leader in energy transition and leverage a collaborative ecosystem in the form of a competitiveness cluster in the energy sector. ATE is funded by the Recovery and Resilience Program (PRR) under the EU framework. Website: https://www.aate.pt

 

 

Speakers’ short bio:

Thiago Sobral: Thiago is the Technical Coordinator for Research, Development, and Innovation at OPT and has been an Invited Assistant Professor from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at FEUP since 2014. His areas of interest focus on the intersection of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Information Visualization, and Ontology Engineering. He was a member of INESC between 2016 and 2021, at the Centers for Industrial Engineering and Management (CEGI) and Center for Enterprise Systems Engineering (CESE) in 2022, where he developed research activities in the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (Urban Mobility and Port Logistics), and the application of Information and Communication Technologies, namely Ontology Engineering and Data Visualization. During this period, he visited foreign institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna), where he actively participated in research projects in these areas. He holds a B.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2011), a Master’s Degree in Service Engineering and Management from FEUP, and a Ph.D. in Transport Systems from the same institution, within the scope of the MIT Portugal Program.

João Teixeira: João Teixeira holds a Ph.D. in Spatial Planning (Cum Laude) and a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering, with nearly 8 years of research experience in sustainable mobility. His career is focused on transport and spatial planning, with a particular emphasis on active and shared micromobility. João has authored 15 research papers (12 as 1st author) in high-impact journals, a book chapter, and 22 presentations in scientific conferences and workshops, resulting in over 1000 citations and a h-index of 14. João is currently working on the ATE Project, funded by European Funds NextGeneration EU, studying the travel behaviour of intermodal users, namely through marketing segmentation techniques. He also teaches in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Bachelor’s and Master’s programs at FEUP, including supervising Master’s theses.

Luísa Bastos Leite: Born in 2002 in Porto, she graduated in Industrial Engineering and Management from FEUP in 2023, having been distinguished as the student with the best average in the course. During her academic career, she was actively involved in extracurricular initiatives, having joined the administration of JuniFEUP, FEUP’s Junior Enterprise, where she developed leadership and project management skills. She has also supplemented her training with several internships at consulting firms, including a recent experience at McKinsey & Company. Last semester, she completed an Erasmus mobility program in Munich at the Technische Universität München (TUM), one of Europe’s most prestigious technical universities. She is pursuing an M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management at FEUP and conducting research within the scope of the ATE project. Her recent work focuses on synchronization techniques in public transport, including developing a literature review article in this research domain.

 

Meeting #36 – Bibliometric Network Analysis for Systematic Literature Reviews [Workshop]

GITMob meeting no. 36

This workshop will be presented by Thyago Nepomuceno, from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. The workshop will take place at FEUP, room L202A, on Tuesday, March 25th 2025, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Description:

Conducting a systematic literature review is a crucial step in consolidating knowledge and exploring any scientific domain. This short course provides an introduction to the principles and techniques of systematic reviews and bibliometric network analysis to map and analyze the relationships between academic publications. Participants will explore essential concepts related to co-citations, co-authorships, co-occurrences, and bibliographic coupling, gaining practical insights into how these networks can reveal patterns and connections within the academic landscape. We will have the opportunity to understand how to define the most appropriate query strings and eligibility criteria for bibliographic searches, methods for filtering the number of relevant papers to review and how to assess the validity of the findings of the included studies. We will discuss practical case studies extracting relevant bibliographic data from SCOPUS, Web of Science and other sources, with examples published in international journals, to demonstrate the application of these concepts in building a robust and comprehensive review with graph-based, distance-based and timeline visualizations from the main software in the area (Vosviewer, Citenet Explorer and Bibliometrix (R)). In the end, we will have insights to construct research agendas based on the coverage of concepts, attractiveness, or research gaps and how bibliometric network tools can be useful in other domains of scientific research beyond systematic reviews.

Short Bio:

Prof. Dr. Thyago Nepomuceno is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil. He teaches and coordinates master’s and doctoral programs in Statistics at UFPE, supervising dissertations and theses in the fields of applied statistics and operations research. He has experience in coordinating 21 projects in Brazil and has authored many papers in the field of operations research, data analytics, and quantitative methods applied to socioeconomic problems, most of them in the field of Data Envelopment Analysis, Bibliometric Investigations, Time Series and Geographic Information Systems. He is the leader of the Research Group on Efficiency and Data Analysis (GEDAI). His main research interests are in Productivity and Efficiency Analysis, Econometrics, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Spatial Statistics and Bibliometric Network Analysis.

Meeting #35 – 3DTrans: Explorando o Triplo Desafio do Sistema de Transportes e sua Relação com a Infraestrutura Viária Urbana

Aproveitando a visita da Prof.ª Verônica Castelo Branco, Profª. Associada da Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil, a próxima sessão terá como título “3DTrans: Explorando o Triplo Desafio do Sistema de Transportes e sua Relação com a Infraestrutura Viária Urbana”. A sessão decorrerá no próximo dia 18 de março de 2025, das 11h30 às 12h30, na sala Prof. Joaquim Sarmento (G129) e será moderada pela Prof.ª Sara Ferreira.

 

Resumo da apresentação

Este projeto propõe uma abordagem inovadora e abrangente para enfrentar os desafios do sistema de transportes urbanos, com foco em três frentes principais: emissões de poluentes atmosféricos, sinistro de trânsito e vulnerabilidade social. O Projeto 3DTrans investiga como os níveis de emissão de poluentes veiculares, parâmetros de superfície e geometria viária e a disponibilidade de infraestrutura urbana podem confluir para mitigação de problemas ambientais, de saúde pública e socias por meio proposição de Rotas Verdes. Esta proposta, incluída nos objetivos 9, 11 e 13 da Agenda 2030 da ONU, visa investigar: (i) a relação entre o estado de conservação das vias, medido principalmente pelo Índice de Irregularidade Longitudinal de Pavimentos – IRI (do inglês, International Roughness Index), e os níveis de emissão em corredores de Transporte, particularmente aqueles compartilhados por transporte público e veículos de carga; (ii) a relação entre o estado de conservação das vias, medido por características geométricas de projeto e superfície (coeficiente de atrito e textura de superfície), além da associação com o padrão de condução veicular, podem promover a segurança viária; (iii) a relação entre o estado de conservação das vias e os impactos gerados nas comunidades, especialmente as mais vulneráveis em centros urbanos.

 

Oradora convidada

Verônica Castelo Branco. Prof.ª Associada, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil. Coordenadora do Grupo de Pesquisa TRAMA: Transportes & Meio Ambiente.

Verônica Castelo Branco possui graduação em Engenharia Civil pela Universidade Federal do Ceará (2002), mestrado em Engenharia Civil pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (2004) e doutorado (Ph.D.) em Engenharia Civil pela Texas A&M University (2008). Desde 2009, é Professora do Departamento de Engenharia de Transportes da Universidade Federal do Ceará (DET/UFC), atualmente Professora Associada IV, e docente permanente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Transportes (PETRAN/UFC). Tem experiência na área de Engenharia Civil, com ênfase em Infraestrutura de Transportes, especialmente voltada para a caracterização de materiais para pavimentos: rodoviários, ferroviários e aeroportuários, redução de impacto ambiental em Transportes e funcionalização de estruturas. Tem especial interesse por Educação em Engenharia, Engenharia Social e Equidade de Gêneros nas áreas de STEM.

Seminars | 21st Oct 2022 | LIACC-DEI FEUP

 

On behalf of Prof. Rosaldo Rossetti, from LIACC-DEI, we are sharing the following information.

 

Within the framework of the European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH), we are glad to host the visit of Stéphane Espié and Abderrahmane Boubezoul, visiting DEI during this week. Our guests will deliver two seminars on Friday, October 21, at 9.00 am, in Room B 009.

 

Tools and methods for the understanding of road users behaviours (by S. Espié)

To be efficient and accepted, because acceptable, road safety counter-measures need to be defined thanks to scientific studies. The question is not only to imagine an optimal solution in the absolute, but to understand the real practices and, based on this knowledge, to design the measures (sensitivity campaigns, changes in Highway Code, changes in initial training curriculum or licence tests, infrastructure (re)design, vehicles homologations, etc.).
In our talk we will describe the tools and methods we promote and refined for decades to improve road safety, and their use in research projects. Our approach is systemic and is based on three pillars: instrumentation of vehicles for in-depth naturalistic studies, traffic modelling and simulation using a multi-agents system, and design of driving simulators to study driving behaviours. We will illustrate our approach using research projects we have conducted over these last years.

 

Driving-Pattern Identification and Event Detection Based on an Unsupervised Learning Framework: Case of a Motorcycle-Riding Simulator
(by A. Boubezoul)

Analysis of human driving behavior aims to inspect drivers’ behavior in the real-world and in a virtual environment. The study of driving behaviors can be conducted in naturalistic situations or controlled experiments. Analyzing driving behaviors based on the data collected in naturalistic driving experiments or controlled experiments in the real-world or in a virtual environment is beneficial to fill in many of the knowledge gaps about driving behaviors and risk factors. I will present a multi-step framework for analyzing driving behavior on macroscopic and microscopic scales. The core step of this framework is based on unsupervised machine learning algorithms applied to driving-pattern identification and the detection of critical driving events using anomaly-detection algorithms. The detected events are interpreted and described by computing their feature importance using graphs centrality measures. This provides new insight into driving behavior by identifying the motives behind the driver’s actions.

 

About the authors

Stéphane Espié is a research director at the Gustave Eiffel University. He hold an Accreditation to Direct Research in Computer Science (HdR, Pierre et Marie Curie University, 2004). His main research areas are behavioural traffic simulation (MAS based), and the design of tools to study road user behaviours (driving/riding simulators and instrumented vehicles). He currently conducts his research in SATIE laboratory (Paris Saclay university) where he leads the MOSS (Methods and Tools for Signals and Systems) research group.

Abderrahmane Boubezoul received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Mathematics from University Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille III), France in 2008 and his Master’s degree in Virtual Reality and Complex Systems from Evry Val d’Essone University, France. Since 2008, he is a researcher at Gustave Eiffel University. His current work is about statistical signal processing and machine learning applied to road transport systems. He currently conducts his research in SATIE laboratory (Paris Saclay university) MOSS (Methods and Tools for Signals and Systems) research group.

Meeting #33 – Data collection and analysis for road safety

 

This session will take place on 26 April 2022 at room L202 of Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP). The topic is Data collection and analysis for road safety, presented by João Neves, from Ascendi.

Moderator: António Lobo (FEUP/DEC)

Ascendi has invested in data collection mechanisms and is using those data to improve road safety. In this session, João Neves will present how data is currently being used and its potential to help improve road safety measures and drivers’ behaviours.

[Call for abstracts – deadline extended] CITTA 2022 | 14th Anual Conference on Planning Research – Safe, Equitable and Just Communities

Posted on by gitmob

The CITTA 14th Annual Conference on Planning Research will be held at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal, on 17 June 2022, under the main topic “Safe, Equitable and Just Communities”. The call is open for contributions focused on (i) understanding the patterns, values, desires, needs, and behaviours associated with different communities and groups of population, (ii) stimulating community-led initiatives and public participation to assist policy- and decision-making and to ensure the success of these processes, (iii) delivering systematic outcome-driven approaches able to encompass and promote social welfare, trust, and fairness in the resolution of spatial planning and transport problems, and/or (iv) deriving policies and actions to bridge the gaps between innovation and societal changes. Conference sessions will be organized in four tracks: 

  1. Planning for social and environmental justice;
  2. Equitable and just urban policies;
  3. Accessible and inclusive transport systems and mobility services;
  4. Safe and efficient transport systems.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 06 May 2022. Full papers (optional) may be submitted by 30 June 2022.
For more information, please visit the conference website: www.fe.up.pt/citta2022. Any inquiries should be sent to citta2022@fe.up.pt. 

Seminar on Green Logistics

Next week we will have a two part seminar on Green Logistics with Professor Javier Faulin. We invite any one interested on this topic, and in Operational Research, to join us. The seminar will be on the 15th november (2pm-4pm) and on the 16th november (11am-1pm), at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management (FEUP), in room L202.

The seminar is free, but requires registration (register here).

______________________________

Short bio

Dr. Javier Faulin is a Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the Department of Statistics, Computer Science, and Mathematics in the Public University of Navarre-UPNA (Pamplona, Spain). He develops his research activities in Sustainable Transportation and Smart Logistics at the Institute of Smart Cities at the UPNA, being part of his steering committee since 2017. He also collaborates as Instructor-Tutor at the UNED local center in Pamplona.
He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Business from the University of Navarre (Pamplona, Spain), a M.Sc. in Operations Management, Logistics and Transportation from UNED (Madrid, Spain) and a M.Sc. and BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Zaragoza (Zaragoza, Spain). He has extended experience in distance and Web-based teaching during the last 20 years in different European universities. Moreover, his teaching has been developed in the following centers: Public University of Navarre (Pamplona, Navarre, Spain), University of Navarre (Pamplona, Navarre, Spain), UNED (Madrid, Spain), the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain), the University of Rennes 1 (Rennes, France), and the University of Surrey (Guilford, Surrey, UK). Similarly, he is involved in assessment activities developed in well-known institutions such as the University College of Dublin (Ireland) or the FWO-Flanders Research Foundation (Belgium).
His research interests include transportation and logistics, vehicle routing problems and simulation modelling and analysis, especially in the practical resolution of logistics and delivery problems of companies. Similarly, he has developed a research line of evaluation of environmental impact of freight transportation and its relationship with vehicle routing problems. In order to model the previous problems, he has collaborated in the development of the simheuristics methodology as a way of imbrication of simulation with optimization (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221471601500007X).
He has published more than 150 papers in international journals, books and proceedings about logistics, routing and simulation. Similarly, he has taught many courses on line about Operations Research (OR) and Decision Making, and he has been the academic advisor of  eight PhD students and more than 60 graduate and master students. Furthermore, he has been the author of more than 200 talks in OR conferences. He is or has been an editorial board member of the journals: Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review (TRE), Sustainability (Sustainable Transportation Section), Journal of Applied Operational Research (JAOR), ORMS Letters (ORMSL), International Journal of Applied Management Science (IJAMS) and International Journal of Operations Research and Information Systems (IJORIS).