Mobility Management Research Center
The Mobility Management Research Center (MMRC) was founded in 1994 as part of the Transportation Research Institute. The Center specializes in developing algorithms, methodologies, and systems for promoting sustainable urban mobility.
MMRC conducts multidisciplinary research, based on know-how and expertise in Transportation Engineering, Process Engineering, Operations Research, Statistics, Data and Text Mining, System Analysis, and Software Engineering.
MMRC works in close cooperation with all the major transport authorities in Israel, as well as with high-tech companies. Alongside the local cooperation, MMRC is also involved in international research projects through various research frameworks, such as the EU R&D Framework Program.
R&D examples
AVIVIM – Traffic Management System
AVIVIM is the Traffic Management and Control System of the municipalities of Tel-Aviv and Haifa. AVIVIM follows the classical approach of management and operational layers. MMRC has conducted research focusing on decision-support traffic management methodologies since 1994, funded originally by the Municipality of Tel Aviv and the Israeli Ministry of Transport. As a result of the success of the implementation of AVIVIM in Tel Aviv, it was adopted by the municipality of Haifa in 2006, who is now a partner in funding the ongoing development of the system.
The research in this area continues to address the ever-growing mobility needs of public transit users, private vehicle users and pedestrians, and is reflected in new methodologies incorporated into AVIVIM.
The Municipality of Tel Aviv has chosen to present AVIVIM as the municipal state-of-the-art system in several benchmarking projects, and AVIVIM has been recognized as one of the most advanced Traffic Management and Control Systems in the world.
Harvesting the potential to achieve transport Policy Goals[1]
Harvesting transport information from social media is a new field, with the potential to improve the understanding of users’ needs and as a basis for supporting the achievement of transport policy goals.
An exploratory case study was conducted using authentic Twitter data, with the goal of associating Twitter postings with the one of three categories defined: Expressing a need for a transport service; Expressing an opinion regarding a transport service and Reporting a transport related incident or event. The case study targeted football matches in the UK, where an initial pool of candidate text posts were filtered from the stream of Tweets posted over a period of about one week around each match.
Automatic classification of Tweets as transport-related, as well as classifying them into one of the three categories, yielded high performance both in terms of coverage and relevance. Research results support the hypotheses that valuable information for transport policy makers exists on social media and that such information can be effectively harvested.
Social media, as a two-way communication arena between transport authorities and travelers, continue to be one of the research areas that researcher at MMRC are engaged in.
[1] The research was partially funded by the University of Leeds through the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) scheme, and was conducted in cooperation with researchers from the University of Leeds, The University of Haifa and IUAV University of Venice.