Researchers Receive $2.5 M Grant to Focus on Improving Atlanta-Area Transportation Through Holistic Community Approach

Researchers from Georgia Tech have been awarded a $2.5 million National Science Foundation Smart and Connected Communities Grant to develop systems that will improve travel mobility, safety, equity, and sustainability using the city of Peachtree Corners, Ga., as an immersive living lab.

During the course of the four-year project, the research team will develop tools and evaluate policies that will allow communities to leverage advances in information, communication, and sensor technologies in a quantifiable manner to achieve sustainable travel goals.

The project’s principal investigator, Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor Srinivas Peeta, explained that the crux of the work lies in analyzing and fusing qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of sources including emerging technologies—like sensors that collect large volumes of data—and communications strategies like community feedback surveys.

Through this grant, the research team will address the challenges of how to integrate disparate, multi-source data from various stakeholders and use it to systematically generate solutions — in the form of partnerships, behavioral interventions, and policy interventions — to meet sustainability objectives at the community level in a systematic, quantifiable manner over time.

“We are making steps toward real-time policy analysis and program evaluation with information-based strategies,” said the project’s Co-PI Omar Asensio, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and director of the Data Science and Policy Lab.

The move toward real-time analytics can be faster, cheaper and potentially more accurate than traditional government transit surveys, which are slow, costly, and update relatively infrequently, he said.

The goal is that after four years, the model will be sustainable in Peachtree Corners and can be replicated in other communities.

“By the end of this project, we hope to have a framework that can be transferred to any city with a smart and connected framework,” Peeta said. “If they’re able to do it there, then it’s transferable elsewhere.”

Assistant Professor Jennifer Kaiser is leading one of 11 projects to receive funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office’s Atmospheric Chemistry, Carbon Cycle, and Climate (AC4) program in Fiscal Year 2021. The competitively selected projects aim to increase our understanding of emissions and chemical transformation in the urban atmosphere.

Despite decades of decline in ground-level ozone and fine