Oxfordshire County Council has announced the completion of the second phase of its New Mobility project, using real time data to support management of the local transport network.
Its iHub unit and Alchera Data Technologies have been working on the project to reduce traffic congestion and pollution.
They have completed the development of a transport data exchange for public sector analysts to use data from the Bus Open Data Service, the RTIG group’s Analyse Bus Open Data Service, local bus companies, traffic sensors, CCTV networks, ANPR cameras and other sources.
Alchera said this can lead towards the development of a prototype system capable of offering highly granular transport data to technology companies and the public.
It provides the potential to support connected and autonomous vehicles, and the development of live data apps on transport flows and patterns.
It has drawn on Alchera’s machine learning algorithms to make use of the existing sensors and camera networks. The company’s co-founder, Anna Jordan, said it represents the only demonstration of absolute, real time traffic counts and classifications at city scale in the UK so far.
Critical project
Ruth Anderson, leader of the future of mobility team at iHub, said: “Finding a way to ensure all of Oxfordshire’s transport systems have access to the same data on which to make real time decisions is critical. We can’t possibly hope to build intelligent infrastructure if all the systems are using different data.
“Alchera’s data hub, Alpha, gives us the ability to coordinate all our transport systems’ data needs, ensuring consistent analysis across the board both in real time and historically to understand the impact of decisions.”
The first phase of the programme involved Alchera carrying out research with control room users and fusing floating vehicle data from the TomTom geolocation platform with that from existing under-road counters from CA Traffic to detect abnormal traffic conditions. This enabled Oxfordshire’s transport team to react faster to adverse conditions across the road network.
The project was funded under the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s GovTech Catalyst programme.
