Accessibility Instruments for Planning Practice in Europe
Coordinator: Isabelle Thomas
Date: 6/10/2000 - 31/10/2014
Project: COST
Accessibility concepts are increasingly acknowledged as fundamental to understand the functioning of cities and urban regions. In particular, accessibility instruments are able to provide a framework for understanding the reciprocal relationships between land use and mobility. Such a framework has important potential advantages when transferred to the realm of urban planning. However, despite the large number of instruments available in literature, they are not widely used to support urban planning practices. Significant benefits are expected, both in terms of process – the establishment of bridges between scholars and practitioners from different approaches and different domains – and in terms of results – insights on how to improve the relevance of accessibility instruments for urban planning practices.
European Doctorate in Economics - Eramus Mundus (EDEEM)
Coordinator: François Maniquet
Date: 01/01/2011 - 31/08/2015
Project: Erasmus Mundus
EDEEM is research-oriented programme and aims to produce top-quality researchers, who will gain international experience working within the research units with some of Europe's leading researchers in economics. Students are trained for positions in academia at the international level as well as for responsible positions in government, research organizations, and business enterprises. High focus is made on research work, publication and presentation, with dedicated Jamborees and Summer Schools being an integral part of the training.
Poverty, Resource Equality, and Social Policies (PoRESP)
Coordinator: François Maniquet
Date: 1/06/2011 - 31/05/2016
Project: ERC
Website: http://sites.uclouvain.be/poresp/
This project aims at revisiting the economics of poverty by using recent advances in welfare economics. First, poverty measurement theory is enriched by taking account of individual preferences over the several dimensions of poverty. New poverty indices are defined. They are applied using panel data of material standard of living and subjective satisfaction to study the recent evolution of poverty in developed societies. Second, the ethical value of poverty reduction is added to theories of social welfare based on equality of opportunities. New evaluation criteria of taxation policies are derived. Third, extreme poverty is redefined by introducing views of social identity and feelings of self-esteem or shame. That requires modeling poverty by taking account of the interactions between poor agents and the providers of social services aimed at benefiting the poor. These models are used to better understand why anti-poverty policies often fail to reach the poor, and, consequently, why poverty is so persistent in developed societies.
Mixed-integer Nonlinear Optimization (MiNO)
Coordinators: Mathieu Van Vyve, François Glineur, Yurii Nesterov and Laurence A. Wolsey
Date: 2013 - 2017
Project: Marie-Curie ITN
Complex decision making in enterprises should involve mathematical optimization methods, because a best choice has to be made out of a huge number of feasible options. A mathematical description of such decision processes typically involves both continuous and discrete decisions. If the latter are present, the customary modelling approach is to use integer variables, which are also used to represent all possible nonlinearities, so that the remaining part of the model is linear. This leads to Mixed-Integer Linear Optimization (MILO) problems, which can be handled nowadays by many packages, but are often very difficult to solve.
Difficulty of MILO problems is often due to the fact that objective functions or constraints that are structurally nonlinear (e.g., quadratic) are linearized by introducing new integer variables. In many cases, it was observed that this is not the best way to proceed, as facing the nonlinearity directly without the new variables leads to much better results. Algorithmic technology for the resulting Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINO) problems is still at its early stage.
The present situation is that enterprises facing a MINO problem generally give up due to the lack of efficient solvers, or try to convert it to a MILO one often too hard to be solved in practice. On the other hand, in the academia there is now an increasing expertise in MINO, which is however hardly exported outside due to the lack of interaction with the industrial world. It is the purpose of this project to help satisfy the increasing demand for highly qualified researchers receiving, at the same time, a state-of-the-art scientific training from the academia and hands-on experience with real-world applications from the industry.
The researchers formed within this project, once recruited by an enterprise at the end of their training, will have the potential to apply all the available knowledge to optimize complex decision making in the real-world.
Towards Rural Synergies and Trade-offs between Economic Development and Ecosystem Services
Coordinator: Isabelle Thomas
Date: 01/09/2013 -
Project: Seventh Framework Programme
In Europe and the United States, developmental paths of rural areas are believed to be plural (Edora, 2011). As early as Thünen (1826), regional and urban economists began analysing spatial and regional disparities through three drivers: (i) natural-resource advantages, (ii) economies of agglomeration, and (iii) costs of transport and communication. Even though natural amenities have been introduced into numerous economic studies, their inclusion remains quite limited. National and international assessments show that ecosystems are and often continue to be degraded; therefore, ecosystem services and public goods are now considered a part of policy and have become increasingly important within the European context (European Commission, 2010).
Population and production locations, commodities, and flow of people are critical components of the relationship between economic development and ecosystem services. Such a relationship has three major unresolved questions:
- Does an optimal spatial organisation of activities, leading to rural economic development while ensuring the provision of ecosystem services, exist?
- How does one combine market mechanisms and policies to reach sustainable spatial allocation of activities?
- Under which conditions do ecosystem services constitute opportunities for rural development?
The trade-off/synergy dilemma between economic development and ecosystem services is one of the major issues of sustainable rural development. The main research objective of TRUSTEE is to disentangle the complex relationships between economic development and ecosystem services at different spatial scales. We will use an interdisciplinary approach that will involve economists, geographers, agronomists, and ecologists. At every step of the research process, we will involve scientists, experts, and stakeholders. In doing so, this research will also strengthen the capacity of a range of stakeholders to design sustainable strategies for rural areas. The sub-objectives are:
- Analyse the multi-scaled determinants of economic development and ecosystem services on a large European gradient of rural and rural/urban areas.
- Increase our understanding of how to achieve mutual benefits for economic development in rural areas and ecosystem services.
- Identify and assess the governance mechanisms and policy instruments that enhance sustainable rural vitality in very diverse contexts.
- Produce synergies among international researchers of varied disciplines and between researchers and various stakeholders at different governance scales.
Social Networks and Travel Behaviour
Coordinator: Isabelle Thomas
Date: 24/03/2014 - 23/03/2018
Project: COST
The past decade has gone through rapid ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) developments, which had wide societal impacts. ICT enhanced the shift from social groups defined by location to individually-based social networks. High-speed telecoms allow for ad-hoc personalised networks that affect travel behaviour. Unfortunately, research has lagged behind ICT advances, as our understanding of current travel behaviour is limited and existing urban mobility solutions cater to population behaviour that no longer exists. The transport demand models used today are based on inadequate understanding of the new social structure. A new transport paradigm is needed for the ultra-urbanized smart city.
This Action aims to initiate a new collaboration framework for the various EU research groups that develops a new transport paradigm based upon ICT social networks and their subsequent travel behavior in the urban environment.
The goals are to explore ways in which social activities become mobilised in space, identify how social ties affect the integration of local public transport into urban patterns, and develop a rigorous conceptual framework for new ideas and methodologies. This work will be achieved by creating a joint discussions platform that includes seminars, thematic working groups, discussion sessions, workshops and publishing scientific results.