Multimodal Electrified Infrastructure Planning (MERLIN)

MERLIN aimed at identifying the impact of technologies and investments on mobility in the GDL by providing tools for prediction/design of multimodal systems.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Oct 2017
Duration in months:

48
Funding:

European Regional Development Fund – Programme ERDF "investissement pour la croissance et l'emploi" 2014-2020
Principal Investigator(s):

Francesco Viti

About

MERLIN had the ultimate goal of addressing the challenge of reliably assessing and predicting the impact of new technologies and future investments on transport and mobility services in Luxembourg by providing a set of tools for estimation, forecasting and planning and design of multimodal systems. The ever-growing congestion levels in Luxembourg are causing significant economic losses, as well as in terms of liveability, environment and health. The complex urban dynamics caused by the fast growth of the population, the workplace relocation of major firms to the outskirts of the capital city, together with the strong development and implementation of innovative transport and mobility services make any forecasting model based on past trends inadequate. There is therefore the need to move to new and more sophisticated modelling approaches which make use of all possible types of data, such as those being collected and, for a large part, made available by the Government. The MERLIN project fits well in this context as it aims at developing a platform to investigate the impact of different mobility solutions for the country. More specifically, our goal was to provide a decision support tool for the Government and for the info-mobility operator, to enable: a) the estimation and modelling of current and future mobility patterns, allowing to identify planning and management solutions; b) the environmental impact assessment of the proposed solutions; c) the delivery of a decision support expert system able to suggest how to redesign the future public transport network. The project successfully developed three new monitoring and planning tools for Luxembourg, 1) a mobility data portal able to acquire continuous data from multiple sources, predict future mobility trends and visualize different KPIs, 2) a 24h multimodal planning scenario and 3) a 24h agent-based microsimulation platform of the whole Gran-Duchy of Luxembourg. MERLIN represents the perfect marriage of fundamental research based on the three principles of computational sciences (data, modelling and simulation) and problem-driven development.