What’s the best way to travel in London and York?
Posted on 3 April 2008
Over the next three years, Freeflow’s team of industry experts, academic researchers and transport network operators, including computer scientists and mathematicians from the University of York, will be changing travel, by turning traffic data into transport intelligence.
This is a major opportunity to work in a new field with potentially high impact and use
Professor Jim Austin
Freeflow comprises Transport for London and City of York Council, as demonstrators of the innovation provided from ACIS, Kizoom, Mindsheet, QinetiQ, Trakm8, Imperial College London, Loughborough University and the University of York. Together, these partners have contributed £2m of their own funds.
Freeflow is a pioneering initiative aiming to develop tools for managing and optimising road networks and, at the same time, informing and guiding travellers around these networks. Existing techniques for handling data are not capable of managing the whole network proactively. A key element of Freeflow is therefore to allow traffic managers to develop intelligent ‘situational awareness’ of all aspects of their networks.
By actively sharing this newly-developed awareness with travellers using new services such as Travel Angels and in-vehicle systems, Freeflow gives a powerful tool for managing transport by influencing demand directly.
Situational awareness is not just a transport problem: telecommunications, the military and stock market companies already use new tools to build better awareness of situations from their data and make valuable and informed decisions from it.
Freeflow’s specific objectives are therefore to:
- Understand what traffic managers want from ‘intelligent decision support’ and how the public can then benefit
- Develop new data from currently underused sensors like CCTV
- Uniquely, introduce ‘situational awareness’ tools that go far beyond ‘data’ we collect now
- Measure effects on network performance in York and London
- Understand and solve the technical requirements for new services
For road users specifically, Freeflow aims to assist them in knowing what is happening, why it is happening, what will happen next and what action they can take to make things better for them.
Iain Gray, Chief Executive Officer of the Technology Strategy Board said: "The goal of efficient and cost effective transport is an important for our society. This combination of technologies and capabilities is a truly novel way to address a problem that affects all of us."
Professor Jim Austin, of the University of York's Department of Computer Science, said: "We are proud to be involved in such a visionary project. It will enable our pattern analysis technology, Signal Data Explorer, to find events in traffic data and suggest new traffic control patterns. This is a major opportunity to work in a new field with potentially high impact and use."
ENDS
Notes to editors:
- The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led executive non-departmental public body, established by the government. Its mission is to promote and support research into, and development and exploitation of, technology and innovation for the benefit of UK business, in order to increase economic growth and improve the quality of life. It is sponsored by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS).