oneTRANSPORT: Building smart city solutions on the Azure cloud
The world gets more crowded every day, and people increasingly choose to live in cities. As such, cities all over the world grapple with a wide range of transportation issues: how to encourage public transit ridership, how to improve traffic congestion, how to optimally integrate multi-modal transportation, and how to optimize parking resources, just to name a few. Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) have begun to help governments make better use of their transportation resources and solve some of their most vexing transportation problems through smart city solutions. One such project in the UK, the oneTRANSPORT initiative, is a public-private partnership that involves four adjacent county governments in an area of suburban north London that is collectively home to 10 percent of England’s population. The project platform was designed by InterDigital to run on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, which provides these local government agencies with a unified platform that is flexible, scalable, and adaptable. Now the marketplace is entering the commercial stage with the official launch to happen in Q4 of 2017.
Let’s take a closer look.
Transportation is a multi-faceted issue for municipal governments, and each municipality experiences transportation issues differently. Suburban governments tend to grapple with major traffic congestion issues because their population bases are connected (usually via their jobs) to the nearest major city, but these suburban areas frequently lack the dense public transit infrastructure the cities enjoy. In order to optimize transportation flow, the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Oxfordshire joined with Highways England and InterDigital on a cloud-based IoT program funded in part by InnovateUK.
When we talk about developing an intelligent, IoT-based transportation solution, flexibility and scalability are highly important factors to consider. InterDigital chose the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for its ability to deploy flexibly in any region of the world and scale to practically any size. The oneTRANSPORT initiative involved those four county governments, and while all four bordered each other, each had their own separate legacy systems to contend with.
Integration issues between different municipal governments are typically difficult to address, because each government has its own schedule and budget, and transportation departments are often asked to do more with less. This is why the platform behind the oneTRANSPORT initiative utilizes open standards approach to the data integration into a unified Azure cloud infrastructure. This reduces fragmentation among data, while simplifying integration and accelerating deployment timelines. This approach also allows new applications and systems to be incorporated (or even built) as necessary, so that transportation agency operators have a much higher degree of future-proofing and scalability than they would by being locked into a specific vendor’s application or solution.
These four county governments are already seeing significant and encouraging results from the deployment of this pilot project, which began in 2015. In the first 18 months of the project, for instance, officials in Hertfordshire have been able to use data to create traffic flow interventions during incidents or times of high traffic volume, and have devised parking optimization schemes using a network of variable signs to direct drivers to available parking in high-demand areas, as well as dynamically adjusting traffic signal timing to hold back certain intersections. All of these initiatives have improved traffic flow, especially during peak times of day.
Transportation challenges and needs are not unlike other industries in that there are many data siloes and incompatible proprietary solutions and overall unexploited data.
Every industry has its effects on the end user or consumer as well. In the case of the transport sector, there are congestion, environmental, and health factors. When interviewed at the beginning of the project, one of the transport counties said that it wanted to deliver sophisticated services to its customers and be able to interact with them, but unfortunately, it was not a technology organization. Hence the county saw a unique opportunity in the oneTRANSPORT initiative to work with the right partners. For cities and local government agencies to get started, it is best that they identify their own challenges, what problems they are trying to solve, and what assets they have at their disposal. Then they can reach out to organizations that have done this before and alleviate some of those growing pains. When developing this platform, some of the most surprising aspects were: 1) managing data resources – ownership rights and siloes; 2) recommendations from public-sector peers carry a lot of weight; 3) smart city solutions should not be developed in isolation – interoperability and knowledge sharing add significant value; and, 4) one must not ignore local regulatory and conformance demands. Do not let your organization be the one learning these and similar lessons all over again!
Traffic volume sensor data, traffic signal data, license plate recognition systems, and so on are all from different suppliers, so all have to be integrated into a common platform.
This is essentially a new framework for a variety of different partners – both private and public – to create new solutions as their needs evolve, and the Azure cloud infrastructure is a key component of what makes this possible.
“The oneTRANSPORT initiative is not just a single project anymore,” said Rafael Cepeda, Senior Manager at InterDigital Europe. “It is an evolving ecosystem. We have the core system, but these government agencies are building new projects on top of the core system, which is proving to us that it’s working exactly as it was intended to. They are able to rely on the core platform as a foundation for creation and innovation. This is creating a national expansion in the UK of this technology, and demonstrating to others what is possible when you build an intelligent transportation system centered around powerful, real-time data on a scalable and flexible infrastructure like Azure.”
For more information on oneTRANSPORT and Chordant, an InterDigital business, you can visit their website. And learn more about how Microsoft’s impact on urban mobility through their various resources and solutions:
