Lab for Innovative Infrastructure Systems

Last Sunday, we presented the results of the Urban Redesign Studio that we have been working on since April for the local people in Uwajima City.

The studio is offered by the Urban Redesign Studies Unit, in which Fukuda sensei is one of the core members. In this studio, graduate students from the department of civil engineering, urban engineering and architecture have worked on the preliminary urban redesign proposal for Uwajima City in Ehime Prefecture. From our lab, Chee Yung and I (Hasegawa) have participated in this studio.

When I was an undergraduate student, I had several opportunities to deal with case studies on different sites. However, this was my first time to perform an urban redesign plan based on on-site surveys and interviews, and to make a presentation at the site. Therefore, we had many discussions not only with our group members but also with students from other groups, professors, and some officials from Uwajima city. We continued to think about whether our proposal can really be fitted in a city where will face some natural disasters and population decline problems over the long term.

Although I was only able to participate the on-site presentation remotely, I hope to hear from the other members who visited the site in detail about the reaction of the citizens to the presentation and whether they agree on it, so that we can further refine our proposal in the future (as I’m planning to apply for the Urban Redesign Competition that will be held in this fall).

Nice to meet you, I am Tabata, currently a second-year master (M2) student! Hasegawa, who is in charge of the lab’s homepage, has asked me to write about the daily life of our laboratory.

Our lab members are engaged in research activities with a high concentration levels. Based on this description, you may think that our lab is a “rather serious” laboratory, but in fact, we’re not! Few days ago, I had a Hawaiian lunch that was bought from a kitchen car with Arai (M2) and Hasegawa (M1).

We have many opportunities to interact with each other in this relaxed manner, and we are building a relationship based on mutual trust through these kinds of personal conversations. That’s why I think our lab members can express our real opinions in the lab seminar. In fact, we were discussing the presentations of Arai and Ebashi (M1) at the lab seminar on that day.

It is my third year in this laboratory, and I think our lab members have a good balance between research pressure and relaxation. Led by Hasegawa, each of our lab members will keep posting some articles in the future. I hope both research and relaxation activities of our lab can be conveyed to you!

Recently, the weather is getting hotter and hotter. I am now getting busy with my courses, laboratory activities and job-hunting activities, and I will continue do my best in July.

For this post, I would like to look back on our laboratory seminars this June. A total of four seminars were held in June, and these learning seminars basically dealt with transportation networks. The first two learning seminars dealt with simple route choice models and deterministic user equilibrium concept on transportation networks. Although I have studied these concepts in my undergraduate study and last year’s learning seminar, my understanding of these concepts has been further deepened this time.

For the last two learning seminars, stochastic user equilibrium and demand-variant user equilibrium have been studied. As a conclusion of the learning seminar on transportation networks, I will explain the spatial price equilibrium model tomorrow, which is closely related to the spatial computable general equilibrium (SCGE) model that I worked on in my graduation thesis. I am going to explain the spatial price equilibrium model in connection with my research, but I haven’t finished tomorrow’s material yet ><

Let’s get off the lab seminars above mentioned, five of nine student members in our lab, including myself, have celebrated our birthdays in June! According to the “Summary of Statistics on Birth” published by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan, there is about a 10% chance that a person will be born in June, it is a pretty great probability (the probability that more than 5 out of 9 students have the same birthday month is about 1%, if you roughly calculated it)!

By the way, my birthday was celebrated with a shortcake after the lab seminar ~

We are pleased to announce that our homepage has been updated. However, the appearance of the homepage has not changed much. The major change is that the address has been changed and the domain name has been changed to the University of Tokyo. LIIS in the current address stands for Lab for Innovative Infrastructure Systems. Personally, I used  “New Generation Infrastructure System Lab” when I wrote my affiliation in English presentations, but from now on I will actively use LIIS.

The site is now responsive so that it can be easily viewed on smartphones!

And we have changed our CMS to WordPress. It is faster and easier to manage than the old one, and we would like to update it more frequently.

It is introduced on the website of Corp.Nankuma, who commissioned us to create the site.

The English page is still under construction, but we plan to make progress little by little with the help of foreign students!

[Hasegawa]

[June 4 – 5, 2022]
M1 Hasegawa, OG Tabuchi, and OB Kimura presented their papers at the Comittee of Infrastructure Planning and Managemant held online on June 4 (Sat.) and 5 (Sun.). The titles of their presentations are as follows.

Time-of-day Charging Simulation of Urban Railways Based on Structural Changes in Demand
(Comet Kimura and Daisuke Fukuda)
Ex-post Evaluation of Recent Inter-regional Allocation Policies in Japan: A QSE Approach
(Keita Hasegawa and Daisuke Fukuda)
The Impact of Urban MaaS Introduction on Lifestyle Behavior and Evaluation of Subscription Plans: A Simulation Analysis in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area
(Keiko Tabuchi and Daisuke Fukuda)

Other presentations related to Dr. Fukuda’s work were as follows

Development of the Activity Simulator “Tokyo Metropolitan Area ACT” and its Application to the Study of Urban Transportation Policies
(Ryoji Ishii, Daisuke Fukuda, Hideki Yanaginuma, Takahiko Kusakabe, Wataru Mogi, Koshi Isono, Takeshi Shibukawa, Hirotsugu Suenari, Ryuta Nishi, Shota Ito)
Fusion Method of Activity Simulation and Observation Data in Tokyo Metropolitan Area
(Akane Komiyama, Kuniaki Sasaki, Daisuke Fukuda, Ryoji Ishii)
Individual Activity Estimation Using Activity Simulator and Cell Phone Base Station Data -Assessing the Applicability to the Corona Disaster
(Ryoji Ishii, Kuniaki Sasaki, Daisuke Fukuda, Yuhan Gao, Akane Komiyama)

Dr. Takayama of Kanazawa University, Dr. Okuda of Nanzan University, and Dr. Kono of Tohoku University gave us advices on the improvement of the model and the direction of future application of the model. All of their comments were very helpful for the submission of the paper. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

[Hasegawa]

Four lab seminars were held this May. Since last month, we have continued to study about discrete choice models in the learning seminar. Each member will explain different models and their estimation methods each week. From logit models to probit models and mixed logit models, I had only dealt with the basic Nested logit model before and I feel struggled now. I will not say that I understood them completely, but at least I could understand some important points of each method, and I will do some revisions when I am going to use them in my future research or practice. As I have listened to these models before, it will be easier to understand them later.

In the research progress seminar, Mrs. Hazama (M2), Mr. Arai (M2), and Mr. Lee (M1) gave presentations. Mrs. Hazama is conducting research on niche tourist attractions using big data, and she is going to conduct a case study on Okinawa. I would love to help her when she conducts a field survey later(for research purposes only!).

[Hasegawa]

Hello, I am Hasegawa, a first-year master’s student. For the past few weeks, this page has not been updated by students due to the Corona disaster, but this year, as the webmaster, I would like to provide you with as much information about our laboratory life as possible.

Last month, the first seminar of this year was held. We welcomed two new members, Mr. Lee (M1) and Ms. Nakamura (B4), bringing the total number of student members to nine. Chee Yung (M1), an international student from Malaysia, joined our lab in the middle of last year and had been participating in the seminar online for a long time, but finally he was able to come to Japan on this day and we had a face-to-face seminar with the full group. Many of the classes are now being held in a face-to-face format, and the campus has come back to life, but I hope that the laboratory activities will gradually become more active as well.

As in the previous year, the frequency of seminars continues to be once a week, with one hour each for a basic seminar and a research progress seminar in the first semester. The basic seminar will cover discrete choice, transportation networks, and urban economics. Urban economics is an area that I personally have been working on for the last year, so I hope that it will be a good opportunity to let other members know what I have been doing.

I will continue to regularly post information about our seminars and daily life in the laboratory on this page, so I look forward to your continued support this year.

[Hasegawa]

The master’s thesis presentation of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the graduation thesis presentation at the University of Tokyo Thesis for the academic year 2021 were held on February 9-10 and February 8-9, respectively. Four M2 students (Ukai, Kimura, Sakurai, and Tabuchi) and two B4 students (Ebashi and Hasegawa) passed the thesis presentations.

In addition, B4 student Hasegawa received the Tanabe Sakuro Prize.

Each presentation title is as follows:

Mr. Ukai: Study of traffic management based on information design
Mr. Kimura: Simulating Time-Varying Fare Policy of Urban Rail Transit Considering Structural Changes in Passenger Demand
Mr. Sakurai: Analysis of Congestion Pricing in A Sightseeing Area with Activity-Based Travel Choice Modeling
Ms. Tabuchi: Evaluation of Subscription Plan in Urban MaaS Considering People’s Daily Activity Pattern
Mr. Ebashi: Online experimental study on traffic information provision method based on self-fulfilling signals
Mr. Hasegawa: Post-evaluation of place-based policy in Japan based on Quantitative Spatial Economics