York has become the first city in the UK to introduce city-wide real-time transport modelling to help ease congestion and pollution through its Smart Travel Evolution Programme (STEP).
Phase one of the programme, which started earlier this year, involved improving the connectivity and data collection of York’s transport technology assets in order to future-proof how the city deals with changing levels of demand.
Phase two, in partnership with Alchera Technologies, introduces an intelligent data exchange platform to manage the underlying data structure and provide real-time anonymised data on the movement of vehicles around the city.
Using its cloud-based, proprietary AI software platform Alpha, Alchera enables data-driven decision making across council transport and mobility operations, giving real-time and predicted data on vehicle and pedestrian movements around cities and major infrastructure.
Alpha takes large volumes of data from existing networks and delivers it to transport and mobility-related applications using advanced machine learning, data fusion and analytics to support data-driven infrastructure use cases.
Dave Atkinson, head of transport at City of York Council, said: “We’re still in the early deployment phase of Alpha and we expect the platform to be fully enabled by the end of the year.
“Previously, the council has monitored the network through staff checking CCTV and social media feeds, with network monitoring operators and transport engineers manually implementing new signal changes to better manage the flow of traffic in busy periods.
“Alpha will be the data powerhouse working integrating with cutting edge traffic modelling software to provide network optimisation and predictions.”
STEP will also generate a multi-layered, real-time model of traffic, public transport and air quality data, allowing York to prepare for connected and autonomous vehicles.
Anna Jordan, co-founder at Alchera Technologies, said: “When you are trying to deal with complex, congested cities, being able to react to situations in real-time is key.
“Our largest system integration combines thousands of sensor sources and performs hundreds of thousands of measurements every day.
“This represents the only demonstration of absolute, real-time traffic counts and classifications, at city scale, in the UK today.
“Data in the system is handled in a fully transparent and auditable way recognising that data ownership and usage will be critical in future smart cities.”
