Spatial & Transport Planning Tools in the New Mobility Era

HARMONY, a project funded by the Horizon 2020 EU research program, applies an holistic approach for providing innovative spatial & transport planning tools to metropolitan and regional authorities, in order to support decision-making and lead a sustainable transition to a new mobility era

The main objective of the HARMONY project was to develop a new generation of harmonised spatial and multimodal transport planning tools, modeling comprehensively the dynamics of the changing transport sector and spatial organisation, and enabling metropolitan area authorities to lead the transition to a low carbon new mobility era in a sustainable manner. The main activities of the project were related to:

• Designing and develop a model suite (the HARMONY MS), integrating land-use models (strategic/long-term), people and freight activity-based models (tactical/mid-term), and multimodal network models (operational/short-term) allowing for vertical planning.
• Identify new mobility services, concepts and technologies for people and freight for urban, suburban, and regional transport and their business models.
• Implementing demonstrations with electric AVs, robots, and drones for freight delivery to understand in real-life their requirements.
• Recommending updates for spatial and transport strategies and SUMPs to deal with mobility transition to decarbonise the transport sector.
• Applying and validating the model suite on six EU metropolitan areas: Rotterdam(NL), Oxfordshire(UK), Turin(IT), Athens(GR), Trikala(GR), Upper Silesian-Zaglebie Metropolis(PL).

The consortium, coordinated by the University College of London, consisted of 21 partners. TRT led the activities related to spatial and transport strategies and SUMPs, and it was involved in the technical activities to design and develop the modelling suite. Furthermore, TRT experts supported the application in the metropolitan area of Turin (IT).

HARMONY Model Suite

The HARMONY Model Suite has been designed and implemented to enable end-users such as planners, decision makers, researchers and transport operators/providers to couple/link independent models and analyse a portfolio of regional and urban interventions for both passenger and freight mobility, including policies and capital investments, land-use configurations, economic and sociodemographic assumptions, travel demand management strategies and new mobility service concepts.

The conceptual architecture of the HARMONY model suite allows to integrate new and existing sub-models with a multi-scale approach, consisting in the Strategic Level (Long-term), the Tactical Level (Mid-Term) and the Operational Level (Short-term). The Strategic Level is mainly composed of regional economic, demographic forecasting, land-use, spatial freight interaction and long-term mobility choice models. The Tactical level is made of a fully agent-based passenger and freight demand model, representing passenger and freight agents’ choices. The Operational Level is representing the transport supply at network level, with demand interactions at high granularity.

The Moby App

Within the HARMONY project, a new approach for travel demand data collection has been used: a free smartphone application, the MobyApp, was developed for Android and iOS.

Downloading the application, the survey participants need only to start the tracking of their trips and activities, and the whole travel diary is tracked by the application. Moreover, a few complementary questionnaires are included in the application, to collect additional information on transport behaviours.

The travel survey was performed in Turin and Oxfordshire: the data elaborated have been used to feed the passenger agent-based model.

For more information

• Social Media: Youtube channel, Linkedin and Twitter
• Deliverables list
• Paper presented at the European Transport Conference (ECT) 2020, focusing on the HARMONY project and the development of a new generation of harmonised spatial and multimodal transport planning tools
• Paper presented at the European Transport Conference (ETC) 2022, focusing on the experience of the passenger mobility survey carried out in Turin with the Moby App, a smartphone application developed within the HARMONY project
• HARMONY Guidelines on Modelling tools for SUMPs in the new mobility era
• Overview of passenger mobility survey results with Moby app in Turin