Project: #366 Smart and equitable parks: quantifying returns on investments based on probabilistic mobility-dependent correlates of park usage using cyber-physical system technologies Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: March 30, 2022 Principal Investigator: Katherine Flanigan Status: Active Start Date: July 1, 2021 End Date: June 30, 2022 Research Type: Applied Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2021 Mobility UTC Progress Report (Last Updated: March 30, 2022, 4:59 p.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 50 % Grant Award Expended: 50 % Match Expended & Document: 50 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments The overarching goal of this proposal is to explore urban park use and correlates of use related to mobility services (i.e., their quantitative linkage to economic growth through equitable access to essential services) using cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies in order to bring to light ways in which city officials and planners can quantify data-driven returns on potential investments to parks and mobility services and implement changes that will uniformly distribute these benefits. Task 1: Prepare the testbed by selecting park/surrounding community (in collaboration with the City of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and Metro21), building Urbano nodes in lab, rigorously testing Urbano nodes in lab, deploying Urbano nodes in testbed community, and configuring the web application for visualization and descriptive analysis. Note: collecting data towards the beginning of the project is a high priority to ensure that the collected data can fully capture correlations to changes in weather, operational, and usage patterns over the course of the project. (50% done) Task 2: Focus on the first primary intellectual contribution, which is the formalization of the data-driven probabilistic spatio-temporal network reliability problem that accounts for stochastic link and nodal weights. Focus on the second intellectual contribution, which is the formalization of a lower limit state function that accounts for a community’s system-wide failure as defined as any subset of a community’s population not being able to access and/or benefit sufficiently (if at all) from its surrounding community’s resources. This lower limit state function is integral to accounting for equity in the system performance metric. (50% done) Task 3: Focus on the third primary intellectual contribution, which is the application of the theoretical framework to the testbed using sensed data (which will have been collected for about 7 months at this point). Use GIS map data from testbed to model the community’s network topology and transportation properties. The majority of the effort in the final quarter will be spent processing pedestrian and environmental data to probabilistically characterize the linkage and nodal weights, which serve as inputs to the analytical framework. Summarize findings in a final report and present recommendations to collaborating partners and stakeholders (i.e., City of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy). Demonstrate to the City how their recommendations, as well as the public’s recommendations (using, for example, the open-source Kurb platform and OpenStreetsPGH), can be assessed via returns on investments using the developed framework. (25% done) This project has provided interdisciplinary training for one PhD student and one MS student (via independent study). A primary accomplishment during this reporting period was the finalization of the legal material needed to begin the deployment, which will be carried out in the next month. We faced unprecedented obstacles getting this off of the ground. CMU legal wanted to be very involved in this process (something they are not doing with other similar projects) which slowed down our progress by several months. Impacts This project acknowledges that the effectiveness of parks and greenways is highly dependent on their ability to connect residents to essential services and their surrounding community, and respects that the reliability of these key transportation linkages should not be limited to just severe disasters. It should also consider everyday disturbances (e.g., delays in public transportation and bad weather) that can be measured using emerging wireless sensing technologies to guarantee an acceptable level of service, even when the capacity of certain roadways and pathways is degraded by various physical and operational problems. The theoretical framework developed during this reporting period represents a new conception of urban resilience, where the once tacit proposition that regular operating conditions are satisfactory is itself challenged and replaced by the notion that a city's normal state of affairs may not adequately compare to some desired state, and that targeted investments in transportation infrastructure can help drive the system to its desired state. Other Development of a data-driven probabilistic spatio-temporal network reliability framework that accounts for stochastic link and nodal weights. This includes formalization of a lower limit state function that accounts for a community’s system-wide failure as defined as any subset of a community’s population not being able to access and/or benefit sufficiently (if at all) from its surrounding community’s resources. This lower limit state function is integral to accounting for equity in the system performance metric. Development of a wireless embedded sensing platform capable of increasing the information gained from passive infrared sensors (PIR), which the team uses in this project to measure pedestrian traffic. While solutions exist that can accurately obtain full information about pedestrian traffic (e.g., computer vision-based platforms), they are very privacy invasive. PIR sensors are fully privacy preserving, but include a great deal of uncertainties. Through this work, a wireless sensing system was developed that can use PIR sensors to detect the direction of travel by integrating multiple sensors, detect the velocity of travel, and detect multiple people passing simultaneously. A full prototype was developed that is being installed for the case study in Mellon Park. Outcomes New Partners This work is being extended to a NSF CIVIC Innovation Challenge proposal. We are now also collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh School of Education and the University of Michigan School of Education. Issues A primary accomplishment during this reporting period was the finalization of the legal material needed to begin the deployment, which will be carried out in the next month. We faced unprecedented obstacles getting this off of the ground. CMU legal wanted to be very involved in this process (something they are not doing with other similar projects) which slowed down our progress by nearly six months. Karen Lightman and I have been corresponding with legal on a nearly weekly basis to get this through. We are baffled because we have not seen any projects face these logistical and legal challenges before.