If you missed the seminar on “ITS & Smart Cities” gven by Dr. Jaume Barcelo of the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on February 12, 2015, a recording of the webcast is now available at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j5QHSwU_n0.

ABSTRACT:

Smart City is one of the magic terms that is pervasively invading our world but, what is a Smart City? What makes a City Smart? Is “smartness” a synonymous of “technology”, or does the smartness rather lay on the use of the technology? This lecture discusses critically the concept of Smart City from a systems point of view, focusing the critical analysis in one of the main pillars of a smart city, the Smart Mobility. The lecture holds the thesis that a smart use of the technology has to be grounded on a sound methodological approach, and proposes the methodology of Transport Analytics. The role of ICT applications in the data collection process is disused, an overview of the data analysis techniques is provided, with special emphasis on Data Fusion, for the knowledge acquisition necessary to build models to understand how the urban system works, and a summary overview of the main dynamic models to assist in the decision making process supporting the city smartness is presented.

BIO:

Doctor in Physical Sciences by the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (1974), since 1986 is full professor of the department of Statistics and Operations Research, and since 2014 Professor Emeritus, at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), specializes in the application of optimization and simulation techniques to transportation planning, traffic management, traffic simulation, dynamic fleet management and other related transportation problems . Since 2007 is the Scientific Director of the Transport and ICT Projects at inLab FIB (http://inlab.fib.upc.edu) of UPC. Is author of more than 120 papers published in Technical Journals, Conference Proceedings and chapters in technical books on transportation.

In 1985 set up LIOS (Laboratori d’Investigació Operativa i Simulació) that in 1997 merged with other research groups at UPC to set up PROMALS (Programació Matemàtica, Logística i Simulació), a consolidated research group certified by the Catalan Government. PROMALS is a Transportation Research Laboratory at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research of UPC, very active in developing traffic models, and namely traffic simulation models, through the participation as partner or coordinator in projects of more than 20 R&D Projects of the European Union Framework Programs.

Co-founder in 1997 and Scientific Director of TSS-Traffic Simulation Systems until 2007, the spin-off company of UPC set up to commercialize, maintain and provide technical support to the microscopic traffic simulator Aimsun, developed at LIOS between 1985 and 1997, widely used today by more than 3000 users in 65 countries around the world.

He has also participated as subcontractor in the SSAM (Subrogate Safety Measurements) project for the FHWA and as stakeholder in the commercial evaluation of the lane selection, lane changing and saturated freeway flow models of NGSIM the “New Generation Traffic Simulation Models” of the FHWA.