The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore Management University (SMU) and Fujitsu have entered a five-year deal to build an Urban Computing and Engineering Centre of Excellence in Singapore.
The S$54 million ($43.2 million) facility is expected to conduct research that will address the challenges faced by highly urbanized cities. It is also supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), and the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore.
The partners said the center's objective is to harness high performance computing capabilities to develop solutions for sustainable urban operations such as crowd mobility and transport engineering, with researchers using Singapore as a "living lab" to test-bed next generation solutions to real urban issues.
Initially, the focus will be on dynamic mobility management to methods to understand and improve the dynamics of commuter traffic in large urban spaces, as well as manage crowds under extreme conditions and surges, using a new computing platform that combines research in sensing, data management and analytics, modelling and simulation, behavioral modelling and decision support.
It will also devote time to maritime and port optimization to study port operation optimization and design of integrated logistics concepts managing inbound and outbound shipments from port to city, aiming to improve capacity without building new facilities.
A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing and Institute for Infocomm Research will contribute capabilities in big data, including visualization and analytics, complex systems, modeling and behavioral science, capabilities in urban data exchange, and machine learning for urban challenges like transport and supply chain management.
Fujitsu will contribute to the development of social innovation solutions, using big data analysis and high performance computing for integrating big data analytics and simulation.
SMU's expertise meanwhile includes methods and software systems for planning, scheduling and decision making that combine artificial intelligence agent-based modeling and simulation, large-scale optimization, mechanism design, behavioral economics and computational social science.
"The Urban Computing and Engineering Center of Excellence offers a valuable and unique opportunity for us to engage in cutting-edge research and development by utilizing Singapore's living big data to the maximum, which synchronizes with Fujitsu's approach of Human Centric Innovation," said Tango Matsumoto, Corporate Executive Officer, EVP, and Head of Global Marketing, Fujitsu Limited.