MustafaMutahari

Dr. Mutahari's work on land use–transport interaction (LUTI) modelling focuses on extending classical frameworks to incorporate digital accessibility. Traditional LUTI models represent bidirectional feedback between where people live and work (land use) and how they move (transport), with accessibility as the key coupling variable. His research proposes augmenting this with a digital accessibility layer capturing ICT infrastructure quality, digital service adoption rates, and social network density.

This modified model, calibrated on Japanese city data, produces meaningfully different predictions for residential location choice — especially under scenarios of demographic aging and digital infrastructure investment. The work directly addresses how planners should account for virtual networks alongside physical ones in regional planning.

Dr. Mutahari developed a multi-layer network urban microsimulation model that simulates the co-evolution of physical accessibility, digital accessibility, social network dynamics, land prices, and household relocation behaviour under alternative policy scenarios. The model incorporates synthetic agents — households and firms — with demographic and economic attributes drawn from Japanese census data.

This tool enables planners to test the long-term consequences of transport infrastructure consolidation, demand-responsive service introduction, and digital service substitution policies before committing to irreversible investments. The social dynamic simulation model is directly relevant to challenges facing municipalities across the Tokai region and beyond.

At the core of Dr. Mutahari's research is the development of accessibility-based frameworks to evaluate how urban and transport systems affect the Quality of Life (QOL) of individuals and the Quality of Business (QOB) of enterprises. He developed a computational framework integrating physical transport network accessibility with digital ICT accessibility to produce a holistic QOL index for urban residents.

The QOL/QOB dual framework builds two parallel accessibility indices evaluated at zone-level granularity and compared across cities. Applied to Aichi (Japan), Singapore, Munich, and Baguio (Philippines), the framework revealed that cities optimized for QOB do not necessarily score well on QOL — exposing critical policy trade-offs that composite indices would obscure.

The "Air-Front Smart City" (ASC) concept describes a new form of regional development anchored by air connectivity, logistics infrastructure, and innovation ecosystems. Dr. Mutahari's research, conducted as part of the JST e-ASIA Joint Research Program, integrates QOL, QOB, and decarbonization into a unified policy evaluation framework for ASCs.

A key contribution is the development of a startup attraction potential index — a metric evaluating a city's capacity to attract knowledge-intensive enterprises based on integrated accessibility, QOL conditions, and business environment indicators. Applied to Aichi (Japan), Singapore, Munich, and Baguio (Philippines), this framework supports evidence-based regional development policy.

Dr. Mutahari's research addresses transport system resilience under compound disaster risk. His study on large-scale evacuation behaviour examined how accessibility constraints and risk perception jointly shape evacuation decisions in Japanese cities under the combined risk of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic.

A further study developed a supply-demand framework to evaluate drinking water shortages and spatial accessibility to emergency water reserves during large-scale earthquake scenarios in Gifu City, Japan — revealing water shortage rates reaching up to 33% in densely populated and mountainous areas.

Dr. Mutahari's research on digital service substitution demonstrates that the relationship between digital activity and physical travel is not simple binary substitution but a complex four-way typology: strong substitution (e-commerce, online banking), complementarity (social media increasing physical activity), restructuring (remote work reshaping residential patterns), and new demand creation (delivery logistics).

His study using a web-based survey of 6,210 respondents found that socio-demographic factors significantly influence digital service adoption, and that social network structures mediate substitutability — with critical implications for how transport planners should prioritize infrastructure investment in aging and shrinking communities.

The core of Dr. Mutahari's research agenda is the development of accessibility-based frameworks to evaluate how urban and transport systems affect the QOL of individuals and the QOB of enterprises. In his doctoral and post-doctoral work at Toyohashi University of Technology, he developed a computational framework that integrates physical accessibility (measured through transport networks) with digital accessibility (measured through ICT) to produce a holistic QOL index for urban residents.

This framework presents how changes in transport infrastructure, service provision, and digital alternatives jointly affect individuals' ability to access essential services, participate in social networks, and maintain well-being — and discusses how this affects De-CO2 efforts. Dr. Mutahari demonstrated that enhanced digital accessibility can improve QOL by reducing travel burden, saving time, and increasing convenience, while also highlighting that face-to-face interactions and in-person services remain essential for maintaining equity and well-being.

A natural extension of this work addressed the substitutability and complementarity of physical and digital services. As cities face depopulation and the consolidation of physical services, understanding when digital alternatives can adequately replace physical travel and when they cannot is critical for equitable policy design. Dr. Mutahari's research demonstrated that social network structures significantly mediate this substitutability, with implications for how transport planners should prioritize infrastructure investment in aging and shrinking communities.

As a research member of the JST e-ASIA Joint Research Program (2023–2026), an international collaborative project involving Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines, Dr. Mutahari developed an evaluation system where economic growth, gross regional happiness, and De-CO2 are the main pillars of the air-front smart city evaluation system.

Within this system, Dr. Mutahari developed an integrated evaluation model that simultaneously assesses QOL for residents and QOB for enterprises, and considers the effect of policy implementations on De-CO2 efforts — including the substitutability of physical services with digital services, promoting startups producing green and eco technologies, and improving logistic networks. This work was published in Smart Cities (2026) and the Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies (2025), applied to case studies in Aichi, Singapore, Munich, and Baguio (Philippines).

A key contribution was the development of a startup attraction potential index — a metric that evaluates a city's capacity to attract knowledge-intensive enterprises based on integrated accessibility, QOL conditions, and business environment indicators. This index provides a novel policy tool for regional governments seeking to leverage social infrastructure investment as a driver of economic regeneration, particularly in contexts of demographic decline, while maintaining higher QOL and reducing CO2 emissions.

To translate evaluation frameworks into actionable policy tools, Dr. Mutahari developed an urban microsimulation model that projects future QOL trajectories under different policy scenarios, accounting for population aging, household relocation behavior, infrastructure development, land price variations, and digital service diffusion.

This model uses a multi-layer networking technique and includes a social dynamic simulation to forecast the future situation of a city while considering temporal changes of physical accessibility, digital accessibility, social relationships, important life events (birth, death, marriage, etc.), land price, and changing residential locations. The social dynamic simulation model enables planners to test the long-term consequences of transport and service consolidation policies before implementation — a capability directly relevant to the challenges facing municipalities across the Tokai region, Japan, and beyond.

The model provides a theoretically grounded foundation for simulating how individuals' mobility behaviours, service usage patterns, and social interactions co-evolve over time under exogenous policy interventions.

Beyond QOL evaluation and the microsimulation context, Dr. Mutahari's research addresses transport system resilience under compound disaster risk. A study on large-scale evacuation behaviour under the combined risk of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic examined how accessibility constraints and risk perception jointly shape evacuation decisions in Japanese cities.

A further study developed a supply-demand framework to evaluate drinking water shortages and spatial accessibility to emergency water reserves during large-scale earthquake scenarios. Applied to Gifu City, Japan, this study integrated household water stockpiling behaviour with GIS-based spatial analysis of evacuation shelter capacities, revealing systemic vulnerabilities in both household-level preparedness and municipal provisioning — with water shortage rates reaching up to 33% in densely populated and mountainous areas.

Together, these studies contribute to the design of more resilient regional transport and urban systems capable of maintaining equitable access to essential resources under crisis conditions.

Dr. Mutahari's research is grounded in applied, collaborative work with governments and communities. Before his academic career, he served as Head of the Transportation Planning Department at Kabul Municipality (2018–2020), where he led urban transport strategy for a city of over five million residents, coordinated with the World Bank (KUTEI project) and JICA on transport efficiency improvements, and directed the preparation of the city master plan and annual transport budgets.

Critically, the impact of this work extends beyond planning documents. Based on Dr. Mutahari's research on congestion reduction, carbon emission reduction through infrastructure budget optimisation, and QOL improvement for Kabul residents, actual transport infrastructure projects are currently being implemented in Kabul City. These include the construction of underpasses, conversion of roundabouts to intersections, flyover bridges, outer ring roads to divert freight vehicles away from congested urban corridors, land-use readjustments, and the phased implementation of the city master plan prepared during 2018–2020.

In Japan, Dr. Mutahari has maintained this applied orientation through active collaboration with the JST e-ASIA international research network and field-based engagement with communities. He has presented this work at leading international venues including WCTR (Montreal 2023), EASTS (Surakarta 2025; Shah Alam 2023; Hiroshima 2021), the European Transport Conference (Antwerp 2024), the IP Fall Conference (Okayama 2024; Fukui 2025), and three consecutive e-ASIA Research Symposia (Baguio 2024; Phuket 2025; Nagoya 2026) where he delivered invited presentations.

Dr. Mutahari's current research focuses on developing an integrated multi-layer urban simulation model that incorporates digital service usage, social dynamic simulations, and physical mobility to evaluate urban policies in aging and declining-population societies.

The core of this work investigates the substitutability and complementarity of digital and physical services, examining the extent to which digital services such as online shopping, teleworking, telemedicine, food delivery, and e-entertainment can replace or reinforce physical activities that require travel. By integrating these dynamics into an urban microsimulation framework, the research aims to provide evidence-based policy tools that help cities harness digital services to enhance residents' quality of life, reduce unnecessary infrastructure development and maintenance burdens, address labour shortages, and expand service supply to meet growing demand in contexts of population aging and demographic decline.

The simulation model represents individuals with varying socio-demographic profiles, digital ability levels, and mobility patterns, enabling realistic scenario analysis of how digitalization reshapes daily activities, social networks, and ultimately urban structure itself.

Alongside these opportunities, the research critically investigates the negative consequences of digital service substitution, including social isolation, deterioration of physical and mental health, the erosion of face-to-face communication and community ties, and a reduction in interpersonal trust — to ensure that policy recommendations account for both the benefits and risks of accelerating digitalization.

Dr. Mutahari also conducts research that examines how digital accessibility and digital services can serve as practical, low-cost alternative solutions to longstanding urban challenges in developing countries. Focusing on cities such as Kabul, this line of inquiry investigates how digital services — including online shopping, remote working, food delivery, and online medical consultation — can reduce traffic congestion, lower air pollution, and improve access to services in contexts where physical infrastructure is limited or unequally distributed.

The research explores how digital substitution and complementarity of physical services can contribute to economic growth, expand business opportunities, and generate new employment streams, while simultaneously improving residents' quality of life and reducing logistics inefficiencies.

By comparing physical service accessibility with digital alternatives and proposing low-cost urban planning strategies grounded in empirical data, this research aims to offer transferable insights for policymakers and urban planners in rapidly growing cities across the developing world.

Dr. Mutahari also investigates the factors that shape digital service usage among different population groups, with particular attention to barriers that prevent equitable adoption. Drawing on nationwide questionnaire survey data, this research examines how the ability to use ICT devices — encompassing foundational internet skills and competence with tablets and computers — determines whether individuals can benefit from digital services in the first place.

The study further explores concerns related to security and risk, including anxieties about personal information leaks, computer viruses, spam, internet fraud, and the trustworthiness of electronic payment systems, which constitute significant deterrents to digital engagement. Trust in online services and concerns about viewing harmful or illegal content online are also examined as independent dimensions of user hesitation.

Additionally, the research investigates how social interaction patterns — such as building new online relationships and the nature of communication with online partners — mediate digital service adoption. Together, these factors are understood as components of latent friction, where anxiety about digital services acts as a friction multiplier that compounds existing barriers and suppresses adoption even when access and infrastructure are nominally available.

Understanding these dynamics is essential for designing inclusive digital policies that reduce the digital divide and ensure that elderly and vulnerable populations are not left behind in the transition to digitalized urban services.