How Can Informatics Be Used to Address the Wicked Problem of Urban Mobility System Design?

Complex sociotechnical decision contexts cannot be addressed by traditional analytical approaches. Rather, they are often “wicked problems”: “nexus of complexity, uncertainty and values divergence” [1]. The Urban Mobility System is an organized complex adaptive system comprised of many intelligent network-aware agents as well as vectors of constraints. It can be subject to goals and aspirations in urban mobility plans. There is a decision problem, a data problem, and a design problem. The approach is to create an informatics construct: a transdisciplinary frame of agent-based micro-simulation, multi-objective optimization, and data mining. Seeking to both study and ameliorate the system at the same time, we outline an empirical research agenda and discuss merits and possible drawbacks.