Food insecurity is the lack of consistent and reliable access to nutritious food. In the Houston (Texas) area, over 14% of Harris County households experienced food insecurity before the emergence of COVID-19. It is unclear how the nutritional needs of Houston’s vulnerable populations will be served when the next devastating weather event strikes the region, given that the city is already experiencing multiple disasters, including COVID-19, economic disruptions, and systemic food insecurity. The Houston Food Bank (HFB) collaborates with over 1,500 partners to address the needs of families experiencing food insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched funding and personnel significantly while driving substantial increases in demand. HFB has adapted to past natural disasters, such as hurricanes and floods, in an ad hoc manner and seeks to build disaster resilience by incorporating strategies beyond current practices. The urgent needs are to identify food-insecure communities, understand their nutritional needs during disasters, and provide nutritious and culturally appropriate food in a manner that preserves privacy and dignity. Left unaddressed, these issues may create failures in HFB’s ability to distribute food effectively, equitably, and efficiently.

For first responders entering into a post-disaster situation, there is usually a severe lack of up-to-date ground truth. The initial period of time has multiple sources of conflicting information coming in and creating confusion about the situation. …

Public transit agencies are focused on making their fixed-line bus systems more energy efficient by introducing electric (EV) and hybrid (HV) vehicles to their fleets. However, because of the high upfront cost of these vehicles, most agencies are …

This Houston-based project establishes a collaborative process with community and commercial technology partners to accelerate the equitable development of accessible fast charging infrastructure and electric vehicle (EV) ownership for low income families by leveraging regional markets of early EV adopters. The novelty of the project lies in a community-driven participatory approach that integrates both social and technical dimensions, bringing transformational change to EV ownership and electrification of smart public transportation. This will be achieved using a data-driven model that integrates real-time data from micro-transit, fixed-route transit, and carpooling services to predict and overcome the uncertainties of traffic conditions, which would result in uncertain travel times and poor reliability. An engaging process establishes collaborative relationships, and identifies adopter indicators and incentives for equitable EV ownership and transit ridership. The project will result in a templet and framework for implementing smart transit hubs, which can be reapplied as best practices at other facilities of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO) or other transit systems.

Public-transit systems face a number of operational challenges: (a) changing ridership patterns requiring optimization of fixed line services, (b) optimizing vehicle-to-trip assignments to reduce maintenance and operation codes, and (c) ensuring …

Modern intelligent urban mobility applications are underpinned by large-scale, multivariate, spatiotemporal data streams. Working with this data presents unique challenges of data management, processing and presentation that is often overlooked by …

Electric vehicles (EVs) are critical to the transition to a low-carbon transportation system. The successful adoption of EVs heavily depends on energy consumption models that can accurately and reliably estimate electricity consumption. This article …

Affordable public transit services are crucial for communities since they enable residents to access employment, education, and other services. Unfortunately, transit services that provide wide coverage tend to suffer from relatively low utilization, …

Power grids are evolving at an unprecedented pace due to the rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DER) in communities. These resources are very different from traditional power sources, as they are located closer to loads and thus can …

Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized solutions are emerging that arrange local communities into …