Category: Intelligent Transport Systems

Natural hazards have long been responsible for a large number of fatalities and disruptions in a society causing high economic costs. Earthquakes, tornados and flooding rank as the most costly events. Recently, the progressive effects of human-induced climate change are slowly but steadily generating increased costs to society that will continue to increase throughout the XXI century. Two additional short term anthropogenic threats at the global scale, terrorism and increased regional conflicts characterized by high fatalities and systematic destruction of the built environment adds to the previous hazards. Dealing with these hazards and their consequences is today the primary challenge of our globalized world.

The primary aim of SUSPENSE is to address this challenge that may compromise the future of mankind and constitutes a major global and EU priority. Recognizing the the very wide scope addressed by the project, the following four main focus areas of intervention are defined:

• sustainable exploitation of sea resources (SEAFACTORY),
• effective implementation of industrialized construction practices (INDUSTRIALIZED CONSTRUCTION),
• development of efficient solutions for aquatic ecosystems (SEA MONITORING AND ECOSYSTEM SERVICES)
• addressing the major problems of growing urbanization with intensive use of technology to improve the cities (SMART CITIES).

Cities are the center of economic and societal development and today over half of the world’s population resides in cities, and up to 80% is projected for 2050. Cities generate more than 80 percent of global GDP, consume 75 % of natural resources and generate 50% of global waste. Resource efficiency is therefore key for cities to contribute to local and global sustainability and offer at the same time high potential for financial savings.

This project focuses on developing and integrating new tools and services to promote urban resource efficiency with minimum environmental impacts while contributing to promote economic development and preserving actual levels of reliability. Dispersion of agents producing data at urban level leads to mixed results in applying indicators in different environments and sometimes with little gain in urban performance. This project will advance the science of urban systems modeling and data representation supported by urban “big data” collection and processing.

This project takes an integrated and application-oriented research approach by focusing on urban interventions in Lisbon, at the “Parque das Nações” test bed. This is driven by a consortia including MIT and Portuguese universities.