Road Traffic Engineering for Improved Campus Mobility

Abstract

Accessing the University of Liège without a car is not optimal. Parking spots are a scarce resource. Moving from one building to another with public transportation is unpractical. Distances are too large to travel by foot. Biking is not really an option, because few secured parking spots and charging stations for electric bikes are available.

The goal of this thesis is to ease accessing, leaving, and moving around the university, by leveraging the empty space in the fleet of cars of the University members.

Practically, this means we want to create an ergonomic system to offer empty seats and to ask for lifts, to, from, and between ULg locations. This system should thus, from the end-user point of view, be available on smart-phones. Offers and demands should be centralised and re-dispatched in a smart way to propose simple and efficient combinations to end-users, and in real-time.

This work consists in the development of an Android application providing carpooling functionalities, enhancing the back-end system developed in the context of another project, authored by PhD student Thibaut Cuvelier, who implemented a first version of a website providing basic matching between drivers and passengers, based on a static graph including the most important towns around the University of Liège.