Transport and Urban Planning

Our vision is to be a world leader in transport and urban planning research. To achieve this, we are undertaking original transdisciplinary research to address the key challenges associated with our priority areas - automated transport systems, aviation and sustainable transport.

We aim to make fundamental discoveries that enrich the UK’s world research standing by advancing our understanding, knowledge and capability to develop enhanced transport policy that benefits everyone.

Central to our strategy is collaboration with world-leading academic colleagues and international research groups as well as carefully targeted universities with a major transport presence, industry and government agencies in the UK and internationally.

Automated transport systems

Our research is concerned with collision-free path planning, self-driving vehicles, sensor fusion techniques and operations and evaluation of smart transport infrastructure.

Specific challenges include:

• How can we integrate traffic engineering theories with robotics in developing collision-free path planning for driverless vehicles?
• How can we estimate the impacts of self-driving vehicles on network-level safety and congestion?
• Can we assist automobile industry in developing intelligent sensor fusion algorithms that would take data low-cost sensors but provide better quality outputs? How could we use data from connected vehicles to spatio-temporally forecast traffic states?

We have an instrumented vehicle (funded by EPSRC) equipped with cameras, GPS, gyroscopes, accelerometers, ultrasound sensors and radars. Data from this vehicle is extensively used to test and evaluate sensor fusion algorithms developed by our researchers. We work actively with colleagues across the University to address the many challenges within this field.

This is a growing area of research worldwide. It is problem-rich, posing challenges and major issues across environmental impact, capacity constraint, energy supply and sustainability.

Our research is concerned with airport and airline planning and operations, airport capacity analysis, airspace and air traffic management, airport ground access, air transport policy, aviation security, air cargo and logistics, the introduction of new technologies and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Sustainable transport

We assess the impacts of transport on society, the environment and the economy. Key areas of focus include: low carbon transport and fuels; noise from transportation sources; innovative forms of transport provision; active travel. Challenges of an increasingly urban and aging society; in the appraisal and evaluation of impacts; implementation and acceptability of sustainable solutions.