H-SMART Lab!

Research Areas

Human-Centered Planning for Future Autonomous Mobility

This research thrust advances a human-centered understanding of how our cities and societies transition toward autonomous and emerging mobility systems. Rather than treating technology adoption as a purely technical challenge, this line of work positions public trust, behavioral perception, and institutional design at the center of mobility transformation. Spanning autonomous vehicles, shared automation, and urban air mobility, this research examines how awareness, safety concerns, and value systems shape collective readiness for next-generation transportation systems. By developing frameworks that integrate behavioral insight into infrastructure planning and policy design, this research informs responsible deployment strategies that align technological innovation with societal acceptance, equity, and long-term sustainability.

Electric Mobility: Behavioral Foundation for Planning & Policy

This research thrust advances a human-centered and system-oriented understanding of how societies transition from internal combustion engines to electric mobility. Rather than framing electrification as a purely technological or infrastructure challenge, this work positions behavioral perception, household decision architecture, and economic trade-offs at the core of electric vehicle adoption. The research develops integrated frameworks that capture how households make dynamic vehicle decisions — whether to keep, replace, or add vehicles — while simultaneously evaluating fuel technology choices. Central to this work is the incorporation of psychological barriers, including perceived range and charging anxiety, into formal choice models. By embedding latent behavioral constructs into vehicle transaction and technology adoption decisions, this research provides a more realistic representation of how electrification unfolds at the household and market levels. At a strategic level, this thrust informs planning and policy design by identifying how infrastructure deployment, pricing mechanisms, incentive structures, and risk communication strategies can jointly address structural and psychological barriers. The ultimate objective is to support scalable, equitable, and sustained electric mobility transitions aligned with broader goals of environmental sustainability, energy resilience, and smart urban development.

Methodological Innovation for Human-Centered Transportation Systems

This research thrust develops advanced methodological frameworks for modeling complex, uncertain, and behaviorally rich transportation systems. Moving beyond conventional correlation-based approaches, this work integrates causal inference, latent heterogeneity modeling, and multi-equation behavioral systems to better represent the interplay between perception, safety, and mobility outcomes. The research advances recursive and joint econometric structures that capture endogenous relationships between safety concern, adoption behavior, and travel demand. It also incorporates latent psychological constructs and unobserved heterogeneity into vehicle miles traveled and policy evaluation models, enabling more realistic representation of behavioral variability across populations. In the context of autonomous systems, this thrust further extends modeling to moral decision-making under dilemma-inducing conditions, bridging behavioral science with safety-oriented transportation policy. This direction overall strengthens the analytical foundations of transportation planning by introducing models capable of handling uncertainty, endogeneity, and ethical complexity. The resulting frameworks support more robust policy evaluation, safety planning, and decision-support tools for next-generation mobility systems.

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Research Areas

Human-Centered Planning for Future Autonomous Mobility

Electric Mobility: Behavioral Foundation for Planning & Policy

Methodological Innovation for Human-Centered Transportation Systems