TOYOTA Project:
Design for the next generation mobility service in suburban areas
SponsorToyota will lead the way to the future of mobility, enriching lives in the world with the safest andmost responsible ways of moving people. In the near future, cars are expected to connect withpeople and communities and take on new roles as part of the social infrastructure. New areas,such as AI, autonomous driving, robotics and connected cars, are becoming especially
important. Toyota aims to reach the ultimate goal of sustainable mobility, creating a mobile
future society with full of smiles.

Project
Rapid suburban sprawl in metropolitan areas in Japan has led to the rapid development of
peripheral satellite cities. High-speed railway networks and motorways have significantly
contributed to improving the connection between established metropolitan areas and thesenew peripheral cities. But at the same time, due to rapid population growth, sprawled suburban
areas with small-scale residential developments were built without schematic road network
planning.
As a result, key functions of the city for the citizen’s lives, such as commerce, administration,and schools, are diffused to suburban area, on the premise of using private cars. But suchdevelopments are not sustainable or desirable as the population ages and as energy
conservation becomes more important. In principle, a higher quality of life can be achieved if
key city functions are aggregated in city centers around the main railway stations. This requires
better and more efficient public transportation networks in conjunction with small personalmobility.
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) describes an integration of different transportation modes andtowards mobility solutions that are consumed as a service. Mobility innovation, often called as
CASE (C: Connected, A: Autonomous, S: Sharing, E: Electric) could be fully or partially
implemented as MaaS. Wider range of demonstration programs and commercial based
services are being provided to improve safety, efficiency and convenience of transportation.

Expectations
There are many studies on MaaS as implementation of CASE, particularly for metropolitan
areas where other multiple transportation modes such as rails, metro and buses are available.

But at the same time, other areas, where private cars are dominant transportation mode, are
not thoroughly investigated. Mobility services for non-metropolitan areas could be different
from that for metropolitan areas, due to differences in population density/distribution,transportation demand, and public transportation network.
As an example, Tsukuba city, a city with a population of 237,000 people, and located 60 km
northeast of Tokyo, has a private car dependent transportation system. In this project, weorganize two groups of students as Group-1 and Group-2 in which the students will design
MaaS for practical cases, in particular for university campus and hospital guests, throughanalyses on existing person-trip and other related data sets.
Group-1: Mobility service for university campus:
University of Tsukuba has a relatively large campus area and a large number of students. The
present major transportation modes are buses, bicycles and walks. Students are expected tobuild a practical planning model to optimize the MaaS for University of Tsukuba campus.
Group-2: Mobility service for hospital guests:
University of Tsukuba Hospital is an advanced treatment hospital in this region. There is astrong need for transportation service for hospital visitors, since the hospital is a few kilometers
away from a major transportation hub. Students are expected to build an efficient MaaS
planning to optimize the mobility service for hospital guests considering characteristics ofseveral types of patients.
The problems setups and formulations may be different for these targets and the two groups
will work independently during the GRIPS-Sendai program. However, exchanging ideas anddiscussions between these two groups will be highly encouraged and we expect someuniversal idea for MaaS in the future society. Although there already exist several approaches
for this kind of problems, students are expected to find totally new mathematical approaches,descriptors, formulations, solvers, visualizations, operation plans, etc. to be fit for our futuresociety with highly sophisticated mobilities. This project includes sight visits to a mobility
exhibition center in Tokyo and University of Tsukuba.

Recommended Readings and References(More references will be added later)[1]

ToyotaMotor Corporation.

Toyotae-Palette

Concept

Opening

Video. 2018.

https://youtu.be/bniK9Eqgnw4[2] Toyota Motor Corporation. Toyota e-Palette Concept Basic Function Video. 2018.
https://youtu.be/7nhY0eHUUEo[3] OECD/International Transport Forum. Shared Mobility: Innovation for Liveable City. 2016.

https://www.itf-oecd.org/itf-work-shared-mobility[4] GRIPS-Sendai 2018. Toyota Group Final report: Data-Driven Models for Predictive Controlof Toyota’s e-Palette Mobility System. 2018. (to be provided later)

Requirements
We welcome applications from motivated team-players who have knowledge and practicalskills of one or more of the followings:••••

Mathematical statistics
Optimization
Operations research
Programing language (Python, C, or MATLAB)