The Emirates Centre for Mobility Research at the United Arab Emirates University conducts research projects in cooperation with various government agencies to serve the UAE strategic objectives and address the most important contemporary issues related to safe mobility, such as “the development of Abu Dhabi’s Vision Zero Strategy project to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries by 2040” in cooperation with the Integrated Transport Centre in Abu Dhabi; “mathematical modelling of COVID-19 spread dynamics in Abu Dhabi” in cooperation with the Abu Dhabi Department of Health; and “the development of agent-based simulation models for the assessment of COVID-19 infectiousness and crowd management at Hajj and Umra seasons” in cooperation with Umm Al-Qura University and the Ministry of Education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Hamad Abdullah Al Jasmi, Director of the Emirates Centre for Mobility Research, said: Our mission in this center is to achieve a safe, efficient, integrated, and environment friendly transportation eco-system by facilitating inter-disciplinary research, enabling inter-play of technologies, boosting disruptive ideas, bridging inter-stakeholder relationships, and disseminating state-of-the-art knowledge.
He added that the center is currently conducting projects related to road engineering and infrastructure in cooperation with the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, represented in the “developing a decision support methodology for intelligent scheduling for road maintenance using machine learning and Bayesian network”, and “the behavior of self-healing concrete in corrosion -induced environment”, “behavior of non-metallic basalt fiber reinforced recycled aggregates concrete”, and “development of automatic identification algorithms for road cracks using convolution neural network models”.
The Emirates Center for Mobility Research, formerly known as the Roads, Transport and Traffic Safety Research Center (RTTSRC), was established at the United Arab Emirates University in June 2004 with the aim of enhancing the university’s role in serving the country’s development goals in the fields of transportation, road engineering and traffic safety. It is the first research center established at the UAE University and has implemented 22 internally funded projects and more than 40 externally funded projects since its inception.
The center constitutes of five research groups: Safe Mobility, Efficient Infrastructure, Connected & Autonomous Mobility, Integrated Mobility, and Green Mobility.
The center includes a group of researchers and experts from various fields such as: computer science, software engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, geography, geographic information systems, remote sensing, statistics and economics. In addition to professionals and experts from universities and other international centres. The centre also has access to all research laboratories at the UAE University that provide a variety of basic research aids, including artificial intelligence and robotics labs, applications and simulation labs, and materials science labs.