DHB: Community-Based Building of Integrated, Dynamic Complex Systems Models for Sustainable Fuel Pathways

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Modern transportation systems provide unparalleled convenience and accessibility to markets, health care, education, and social interactions. This mobility, however, has brought with it a growing number of unintended consequences in the form of pollution, climate change, urban sprawl, congestion, injuries, fatalities and economic inequality. The sustainable accessibility challenge is to ensure that future generations have access to adequate resources to meet their mobility needs and aspirations while maintaining the integrity and resilience of supporting environmental and social systems. The challenge calls for an integrative and systematic approach, not the undirected incrementalist approach currently in place. This project is a group modeling process to construct a comprehensive computer model of the co-evolutionary dynamics of technological transitions toward sustainable transport fuels. The model will be constructed to explore the competitive and collaborative interaction among transitions pursuing improved end-use efficiency, increased use of renewables, and development/diffusion of cleaner advanced fossil energy technologies. Dynamic interactions will be appraised according to the normative objective of sustainability. The modeling team will construct an interrelated set of multiagent-based and system dynamics-based models following the iterative process of problem articulation, formulation of dynamic hypotheses, formulation of the simulation models, model testing and validation, and policy interpretation and evaluation. The model will interlink the probable innovation cycles (i.e., R&D, demonstration, early deployment, wider diffusion) of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, bio-fuel powered vehicles, and hybrid-powered vehicles, all in comparison to conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. The key element in the construction, analysis and application of this overarching model of fuel and vehicle choices is the building of a Sustainable Mobility and Accessibility Learning Community (SMALC). The general goal of SMALC is to work collaboratively and cumulatively over the grant period (and beyond) to produce a rigorous understanding of the complex system dynamics of transitions toward sustainable mobility and accessibility. The particular goal is to use the model(s) we build to improve both collective foresight capacity (predicting how mobility/accessibility systems might behave in the future under a variety of assumed conditions and plausible scenarios) and policy analysis (designing new strategies, policies and interventions and evaluating their effects on the behavior of the mobility/accessibility systems over time, space and scale).