Ontology based approach for complexity management in the design of a sustainable urban mobility system

Due to population growth and rapid urbanization, the demand for mobility has increased over the past decade. In this context, the paradigm has shifted from mobility aimed only at increasing the transport capacity of goods and people to service-oriented mobility, aimed at ensuring sustainability and satisfying the new needs of citizens. This situation leads to the emergence of new problems such as managing the transformation of urban mobility without reducing its sustainability and anticipating future developments. From this point of view, the design of a sustainable mobility system requires an approach that integrates the entire life cycle of the system, allows interoperability between autonomous systems and makes it possible to manage the complexity it implies. In this paper, a method combining engineering systems and knowledge engineering approaches to manage the complexity of assessing the sustainability of an urban mobility system is proposed. The result has been the development of an ontology that better characterizes the needs of all actors involved in urban mobility and represents the complex interactions between their subsystems.