Dr. Katharina Ebner

(in the fields covered by the research center)

A significant proportion of the environmental burden in our cities comes about as a result of commuter traffic. Smart mobility solultions can ease this problem by distributing traffic more evenly across different routes, times and means of transport. They are, however, prone to three weaknesses: Firstly, the vast majority of sensors used for monitoring traffic are stationary and provide no information about the source, destination and also the routes taken by road users. Secondly, there is a distinction between road users and the traffic control center(s). Thirdly, the calculation of the traffic and the data storage takes place at a central hub, which leads to significant costs for hardware and data transmission.

The smart mobility system envisaged in the STREAM project hopes to provide a solution that positively and sustainably influences the mobility behavior of commuters. The idea is for end users to enter their planned destinations, routes, and preferred travel times into a smartphone app which will suggest suitable start times and routes. After correlating the information from all users together and supplementing this with traditionally collected sensor data, a neural net is used to configure individual route suggestions in such a way that the traffic load on the affected routes is as balanced as possible.

In this way, the research project can make a useful contribution towards reducing the incidence of traffic jams at peak times as well as the associated ecological, economic and health problems for cities and commuters. In addition, it can lead to a better understanding of the acceptance and affect of information technologies in traffic control and show how viable technological solutions for traffic in modern cities can be conceptualized, designed and implemented. The specific research interests of Dr. Katharina Ebner and Prof. Dr. Stefan Smolnik are in the area of adoption, use and design of corresponding information systems.