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Sustainable Social Network Services for Transport (SUNSET)

Overall Project Aims

The main objective of SUNSET is to facilitate sustainable urban mobility in the EU through services that build on the latest ICT and Web 2.0 technologies. SUNSET focuses on services that:

Reduce congestion: services that help reducing traffic jams and average travelling times. Our objective is to reduce rush hour traffic by 5% (measured in car kilometres in a specific area);
Increase safety: services that allow travellers to optimise their route, for instance by motivating drivers to avoid roads with many cyclists or by allowing people travelling by train to avoid waiting times on dark and silent railway stations.
Protect the environment: services that reduce the impact of mobility on the environment, for instance in terms of reduced CO2 emissions, improved air quality management, and reduced noise pollution.
Increase personal wellbeing: services that allow citizens to set and monitor personal objectives: like increased individual safety, reduced travel times, reduced costs, improved comfort, and increased health.

Project Innovation

The SUNSET innovation project uses four mechanisms to create new sustainable mobility solutions:

Web 2.0 technology to create communities that are involved in mobility
ICT technology to collect individual travel patterns and to distribute information
Positive incentives to encourage and help travellers to adopt a more sustainable mobility behaviour. Incentives may stem from all parties involved and may contain information about the current and future status of the transport infrastructure and about travel alternatives. Also feedback information of individual travel behaviour or financial incentives will be involved.
Living labs to evaluate the SUNSET system under well-monitored conditions. In the Enschede Living Lab two releases of the full system are evaluated. Two other locations are used to benchmark the SUNSET results.

QMUL Contributions

Work Package Leader for Scenarios and Requirements (WP1)

Task leader for:

Mobility framework implementation and interfaces (Task T2.4)
Services for goals and incentives (T3.3)
Incentives Marketplace (T4.3)
Overall Service framework architecture & design (T5.1)
Design and Implementation of the following system components
Incentive Market Place (IMP) that enables incentives to be created, e.g., by city authorities, to be adapted for tailored to mobility contexts and to be published
Web-based Dashboard User Interface to allow authorities to see different aggregated views of travellers and to manage the system as a whole.
Standardisation (T8.3)

Funding

7th EU Framework Programme Project Type: Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP)
Start date: Feb 1, 2011; End date: Feb 1, 2014; Total cost: 4.102.622 Euros

QMUL Participants

Academic

Dr. Stefan Poslad: Principal Investigator
Dr. Athen Ma: Co-Investigator

Research Assistants

Dr. Zhenchen Wang
Dr Haibo Mei
Ran Tao
Dr. Keijong Li

For participants in other organisations see Main Web-site.

More Information about the SUNSET Project

SUNSET, short for Sustainable Social Network Services for Transport, is a new concept for urban mobility management. Its goal is to reduce the rapidly increasing safety, congestion and environmental problems in modern cities by encouraging individuals and groups of people to change their travel behaviour. The SUNSET concept has been proposed in the previous FP7-ICT call, and is currently being negotiated with the European Commission. SUNSET accomplishes this by rewarding such changes rather than by imposing restrictions or penalties. These positive incentives are facilitated by the SUNSET system, which interconnects the stakeholders in urban mobility management (road authorities, travellers and service providers) and makes use of the latest ICT facilities, such as social networks, sensors on mobile phones and in the infrastructure, and intelligent recognition of mobility patterns. See also Main Web-site.