OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and the Singapore Management University (SMU) have today signed a Master Research Collaboration Agreement (MRCA) at Fusionopolis.

Under the MRCA, a five-year partnership which builds on the Fujitsu-A*STAR MoU signed in Japan in March 2013, the parties will invest S\\$54 million in an Urban Computing and Engineering Centre of Excellence in Singapore to work together in addressing the multitude of challenges highly urbanized cities frequently face. The Centre is also supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister's Office, Singapore.

With the world's urban population expected to grow to 70 percent of the global population by 2050(2), cities increasingly face challenges related to high-density living, such as efficient resource usage and traffic congestion.

Given these issues, the Centre's objective is to harness high performance computing capabilities to develop solutions for sustainable urban operations such as crowd mobility and transport engineering, with researchers using Singapore as a "living lab" to test-bed next generation solutions to real urban issues. Increasingly, technologies based on the convergence of data analytics, complex system simulation, computational social science, and behavioural science will play game changing roles in addressing urban challenges.

The Centre will draw upon a diverse, yet complementary set of core strengths and technologies across the three organisations for solutions to urban challenges. A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing and Institute for Infocomm Research will contribute capabilities in big data including visualization and analytics, complex systems, modelling and behavioural science, capabilities in urban data exchange, and machine learning for urban challenges like transport and supply chain management.

Fujitsu will contribute to the development of social innovation solutions, using big data analysis and high performance computing for integrating big data analytics and simulation. Fujitsu will also leverage its leading-edge R&D capabilities from Fujitsu Laboratories to contribute to the Centre's various research themes.

SMU's expertise includes methods and software systems for planning, scheduling and decision making that combine artificial intelligence agent-based modelling and simulation, large-scale optimisation, mechanism design, behavioural economics and computational social science.

Research will be carried out across all three organisations on real urban challenges faced in Singapore. In addition to the team of engineers and researchers from Singapore and Japan, certain research projects will include SMU graduate and doctorate students.