Metro21: Smart Cities Institute › Projects › Smart Infrastructure

Smart Infrastructure

Cities face the challenge of working with existing, and often old, buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, including digital infrastructure like broadband. Metro21 harnesses CMU's broad talents to take on problems of infrastructure that affect everyone who lives and works in and around cities. Drawing from the interdisciplinary expertise of CMU, we collaborate with our municipal and equity partners to tackle challenges such as indoor and outdoor air quality, traffic signals, road conditions and repair, energy conservation, and digital infrastructure. Recognizing that cities are a system of systems means the many moving parts can be coordinated in ways that improve outcomes for everyone.

Past Projects

Building and Promoting an Autonomous Vehicle Corridor in Western Pennsylvania and Beyond

A mission of the Parties is to advance the Pennsylvania Safety Transportation and Research Track (PennSTART) project through the required systems engineering process and identify the appropriate members (public and private) necessary to leverage the financial and technical resources required to construct, operate and maintain the center.

ARISE Planning Grant "POWER"

There is tremendous need for this project in rural ARC communities. Mobility services in rural areas are insufficient, inefficient, unaffordable, and inaccessible, with highly limited resources. Often, rural trips are made by solo driving in private vehicles with low fuel economy. Public transit or shared mobility options are rarely utilized. Those rural trips are likely to be expensive, long, with a single trip purpose, and thus energy inefficient. More importantly, because rural trips are extra burdensome to households both financially and physically, resources, facilities and communities are becoming more inaccessible to rural populations, which in turn worsens the mobility services, health care service, and rural economy. Thus, rural communities are considered disadvantaged communities as they suffer from a lack of transport options. To address this need, our POWER planning grant’s transportation study worked to better understand the mobility challenges in 24 Appalachian counties across OH, PA and WV and better inform implementation projects to address these issues and help improve the economic mobility of the region and its people. Initially, we aimed to identify potential transportation solutions to fill gaps for individuals seeking transportation to workforce training, jobs and/or healthcare. The data has since refined the work to focus on workforce training and jobs to help enable the economic viability and stability of residents. This project was completed in June 2025 and the team is currently applying for an ARC ARISE implementation grant.

Leveraging Existing Fiber-Optic Cables to Identify and Manage Urban Environmental Hazards

The pilot project, which builds on preliminary research in Pittsburgh, will target just one area of the city to test the approach. DAS will be calibrated with temporary conventional sensors and input from civic partners. Researchers said the challenges Pittsburgh offers could show proof of concept that the science would work in other areas.

Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles

The Federal Highway Administration — an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation — announced Tuesday it has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to establish the Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles. The award will support research on the impacts of new mobility technologies and highly automated vehicles on the evolving transportation system when deployed at scale.

Equitable Broadband

With the announcement of the recent Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding, Metro21 is taking an active role in ensuring that residents across Pennsylvania have access to affordable, high-speed internet.

Smart and Equitable Parks

This project is obtaining, processing, and analyzing several types of data including: 1) GIS map data for understanding community network topologies and transportation properties; 2) traffic use data (for both public transportation and walkable/bikeable pathways) measured using Urbano nodes (configured with passive infrared sensors), as well as traffic data, under different circumstances; 3) environmental data measured using Urbano nodes (configured with NO2, SO2, O3, PM2.5, and noise intensity sensors) at parks to inform nodal weights within the network.

Empowering and Enhancing Workers Through Building A Community-Centered Gig Economy

The gig economy is characterized by short-term contract work performed by independent workers who are paid in return for the "gigs" they complete. Example gig platforms include Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Upwork, and TaskRabbit. While these platforms bring about more job opportunities and lower barriers to entry, growing evidence suggests its generation of significant societal problems, including reduced worker well-being, and perpetuated biases against already vulnerable populations. Most gig workers lack financial stability, autonomy, and have low earning efficiency. Prolonged working hours can also cause health issues and limited flexibility.

World Economic Forum Trustworthy IoT Coalition

The Trustworthy IoT Coalition is a flagship project of the Future of the Connected World initiative, aiming to improve the trustworthiness of consumer Internet of Things devices, such as voice assistants, security cameras, and smart watches. Ultimately it will help to create an IoT system that is more robust, equitable, trustworthy and sustainable for consumers, and empower individuals to make informed decisions regarding adoption and use of these technologies.

Completed Projects

Enabling and Sustaining Connected Communities Rooted in Solving Societal Challenges

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Metro21: Smart Cities Institute hosted an in-person workshop and a series of pre-workshop virtual listening sessions designed to elicit feedback and suggestions from experts in academia, government, nonprofits, civic organizations, and industry to identify solutions to the significant technical, policy, and socioeconomic challenges to integration and scaling of connected communities technologies.

Enabling and Sustaining Connected Communities Rooted in Solving Societal Challenges

City of Bridges: Using New Transportation Options to Drive Low-Income Mothers to Greater Success in Pittsburgh

Funded by the National Science Foundation and led by an interdisciplinary team including Metro21, this project will create new methods for modeling these regional transportation systems. The new models will reflect the growing interaction between conventional mass transit and a range of complementary new (and old) transit technologies. The knowledge gained from these models could further expand mass transit ridership and resident mobility, while also promoting environmental sustainability.

Fire Risk Analysis: Predicting Fire Risk to Prioritize Commercial Property Fire Inspections

Working with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire (PBF), the Fire Risk Analysis team is using historical fire incident and inspection data, coupled with business permits and property condition information to develop predictive models of structure fire risk for commercial properties.

Air Quality Monitoring for Smart Cities: Municipal pollution targets, emissions reduction, and human health (Stage 1)

Polluted air can sometimes go undetected. And its harmful side-effects can wreak havoc on the human body. Have you ever wondered about the quality of air you breathe at home, at work, and in between? Do you bicycle to work for the exercise benefits (or want to!), but worry that it increases your exposure to air pollution? This project aims to remedy this concerns.

Public Art + IoT = An Engaged Civic Space

This project will investigate and deploy solutions for creating and measuring civic engagement with public art and memorials in the City of Pittsburgh. Interconnected cities of the future offer substantial opportunities for increasing quality of life and civic participation. Finding means to measure and understand often intrinsic impacts of artistic investments provides for a deeper connection across citizenry, public leaders and civic planners.

Speck Monitors: Pittsburgh Air Quality Empowerment Lending Library

Fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, is particularly harmful to our health and quality of life. This team aims to investigate and how citizens can be empowered to understand sources of PM2.5 in their homes and take steps to improve the air they breathe.

Evaluating and Improving Asphalt Pavement in the City of Pittsburgh

A review and comparative study of asphalt mix, manufacturing and paving process.

Landslide Prediction and Analysis from Images

The beginning of 2018 was marked by unusually heavy rain falls which caused a lot of landslides in and around Pittsburgh. Fortunately, no person was insured, however, houses were destroyed and several roads had to be closed, some for months to be completely reconstructed. In this project, the team will develop and test an inexpensive early warning and post-event analysis system.

Optimizing Snow Plowing Operations in Urban Road Networks

Working with the City of Pittsburgh's Department of Public Works, the team is creating a prototype in-vehicle mobile application that will provide turn-by-turn routing instructions to snow plow drivers.

Platform Pittsburgh: Improving City Quality of Life Through City Scale Computing

As Pittsburgh becomes an increasingly instrumented city, this project seeks to harness the power of city sensors. The goal is to lay the groundwork to make it possible for researchers, businesses, local government and citizens to utilize this dramatic increase in data to develop applications that improve quality of life.

Understanding the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) Lead Sampling Data

Compliance data from five utilities in the Pittsburgh region (including PWSA) collected from 2001 to the present have been analyzed. Results indicate statistically significant differences in years that do not differ in meeting compliance requirements, suggesting corrosion control sampling is not adequate to provide insights system-wide as expected. More extensive analysis of the broader samples from PWSA is proceeding.

Pittsburgh Crime Hot Spot Project: Preventing Crime with Predictive Policing

The team developed a predictive analytic tool to predict crime hot spots and prevent serious violent crime. The project is complete and ended in 2019.

Smart Street Sweeping

The team’s project goal was to decrease street sweeping-related parking violations by 25 percent and make the issuing of the remaining tickets less of an impediment on sweeping operations.

Evaluation of Green Infrastructure to Mitigate Sewage Overflows in Pittsburgh

The team will use sensors to determine the efficacy of three Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) installations planned for the Nine Mile Run Watershed area in the Homewood neighborhood of the City of Pittsburgh.

On-demand Work Recommendation for Disadvantaged Youth Using Smartphones

We propose On-demand work matching for at-risk young adults, a novel initiative for workforce development and employment through mobile and recommendation technology combined with a nine-month training program called Night Owl Bakers (NOB) developed by the Latham Street Commons.

Smart Services for People Experiencing Homelessness

This project combats homelessness by allowing agencies that offer street outreach services the opportunity to collaborate via a phone app.

Demand-side Incentives to Mitigate Wait Times at Airport Security Checkpoints

This project developed an analytical model of screening operations at security checkpoints, motivated by problems faced at major airports. The model aims to provide decision-making support for screening operators, as well as strategic insights for the design of screening checkpoints.

Optimal Escort Dispatch for Airport Travelers with Reduced Mobility

An important component of airport landside operations involves providing assistance to passengers with reduced mobility. This project explores how to enable efficient escort dispatch to improve travelers' experiences and seamlessly create a smart airport.

Pennsylvania’s Grid-Scale Solar Future: Siting, Evaluating, and Elevating Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Solar Impact

Metro21 Distinguished Fellow Rick Stafford’s research will allow Pennsylvania to drastically increase environmentally-friendly energy production with the least possible negative impact on communities.

Monitoring of Energy and Infrastructure Systems for the Hazelwood Green Site

The team is assisting the Almono development in achieving energy savings of 50 percent.

Surtrac 2.0

Working at the request of City of Pittsburgh DOMI to prepare the City for its planned expansion of the adaptive signal network, this project will upgrade the Surtrac Pittsburgh deployment to incorporate the latest technology advances (Surtrac 2.0).

Route 51 Corridor Transformation Study: Phase II

The Route 51 Corridor Transformation Study is a holistic urban design, environmental and transportation research project that will include: networked traffic signalization, economic development, land use, storm water, air quality and much more.

Artificial Light Survey of Nighttime Pittsburgh

The goal of this project was to improve the quality of life for city residents by undertaking a light survey of the city at resolutions finer than can be done by open satellite surveys. Light pollution, artificial light at night, is responsible for producing an unhealthy environment for plants and animals and impacts human health and safety. It wastes money and, with the introduction of LEDs, is rapidly getting worse.

BETAPGH: A Framework for Engaging Local Startups in Product Pilots with the City of Pittsburgh

The City of Pittsburgh is often approached by local startups who want to partner with the City to pilot their products and services. However, no process was in place. So the CMU team developed a plan.

CardiAction: Emergency Response Capstone

911 response to emergency medical conditions involves complex logistics where lives are dependent on the capability of the systems that they encompass. Acute illnesses are time dependent, and minutes can make the difference between life and death. Modern 911 medical response systems have therefore been formulated around principles of rapid recognition and rapid response.

Workshop on Measuring Community Sentiment About the Police

The purpose of the workshop was to bring together a small group for a two-day workshop to brainstorm on how social media, web-based surveys, and conventional surveys might be used to assemble valid data on community sentiment in an economic and practical fashion.

Evaluating Benefits of Coupling Solar Energy and Electric Vehicles in City of Pittsburgh

The goal of this research project is to evaluate the opportunity for sustainability and economic improvements in City of Pittsburgh operations through municipal plug-in electric vehicles, downtown public charging stations and distributed solar energy.

Incentive Design in Ride Sharing Platforms

Ride-sharing platforms have quickly become a widespread phenomena, with significant impacts on urban mobility systems and economies as a whole. At the same time, the ultimate benefits of these platforms might be hindered by mismatches between supply and demand at some hours of the day (temporal mismatch) or in some locations in a city (spatial mismatch). This project explicitly studies the economic aspects of ride-sharing platforms, and particularly the design of incentive systems to align the behaviors of riders and drivers on the platform with broader mobility objectives.

Platform Pittsburgh: Deploying Real-Time Multi-Pollutant Sensors (RAMP)

Beginning mid-July 2016, this project deployed 50 RAMP sensors at traffic intersections in the East End of the City of Pittsburgh.

Preparing for Local Adaptation: Understanding Flood Risk Perceptions in Pittsburgh

In this project, the team is partnered with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) to understand information and attitude gaps around issues of flooding, stormwater management and possible adaptation techniques.

Developing and Deploying Methodologies for Improving the Accuracy, Fairness, and Trustworthiness of Risk Assessment Models in Child Welfare

This proposal aims to contribute toward developing and deploying methodologies for improving the accuracy, fairness, and trustworthiness of risk assessment models in child welfare.

Open Pittsburgh wireless Research Accelerator (OPERA)

The Open Pittsburgh wireless Research Accelerator (OPERA) is an initiative led by CMU’s Metro21 Smart Cities Institute in partnership with the City of Pittsburgh and other public and private entities.

Providing Enhanced Public Input on Metro21 Projects

Carnegie Mellon's Program for Deliberative Democracy will now extend its efforts by working with Metro21 to design and implement a public engagement component for their work.

LED Street Light Research Project Part II: New Findings

The City of Pittsburgh and the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) began a project in 2011 to test the effects of LED light quality. Since 2012, the City has installed more than 4,500 LED lights around Pittsburgh and the RCI team published a report of findings in July 2016.

Reducing Congestion and Emissions with an Airbnb for Intelligent Curbs

This project creates a proof of concept for an “Airbnb” for intelligent curbs. The concept will evaluate pathways to maximize efficiency, minimize congestion, and enhance sustainability for urban networks.

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