Building resilience into smart mobility for urban cities: an emerging economy perspective

Population growth in urban cities has created transport problems such as traffic congestion, pollution, accidents, and infrastructure failures. These problems often lead to disruption of mobility, especially in emerging economies. The goal of any city is to have a resilient transport system that is free from frequent and severe disruptions. Resilience can be incorporated into smart mobility systems to create a robust, integrated and intelligent transport system. Therefore, this study sought to determine resilience factors required for a resilient smart mobility system in emerging economies. The study used interpretive structural modelling (ISM) to establish the causal interrelationships among the factors drawing from data from experts in smart cities, city transport and academia. It was found that the most critical factor to drive resilience is foresight – the ability to anticipate disruptions. Three other resilience factor categories identified were dynamism, certainty and optimisation, which all point to the importance of building dynamic capabilities. The key implication for practice highlights the role that human and artificial intelligence can play in anticipating natural, social and infrastructure disruptions. ISM offered a mechanism to determine the critical causal resilience factors to be prioritised amongst the competing demands on the limited resources of emerging economies. Apart from foresight, which was found to be a driving factor, the other resilience factors are equally strong linkage factors (influence each other), thus further revealing the complexities that decision-makers in urban cities of emerging economies constantly face. A research agenda for resilience in smart mobility in emerging economies was developed.