Project Grant 2309668

The Trustees of Stevens Institute of Technology received a $102,100 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation under the Engineering federal grant program (CFDA 47.041). The award will fund research from July 2023 through June 2026 to develop diverse fairness measures and optimization models to evaluate fairness in emerging infrastructure systems with high operational dynamics. Specific objectives include creating a novel framework using multi-level utility functions and a social welfare function to quantify fairness impacts on various population groups for systems such as shared e-scooters. The research will also develop new optimization methods and solution approaches like a customized Benders decomposition method to preserve fairness under operational changes. A case study on shared micro-mobility systems and experiments using real-world data will provide policy insights. Findings will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses at Stevens and used to attract students, especially women and underrepresented minorities, to technology programs. The award advances the NSF's mission to improve engineering research and education quality and economic strength.