A new report for the Department for Transport into the transport benefits of big data and the internet of things in smart cities says that the potential benefits could be considerable in the areas of land use, safety, network utilisation and customer services.
“Scoping Study into Deriving Transport Benefits from Big Data and the Internet of Things in Smart Cities” by Ricardo Energy and Environment looked at a variety of issues including a review of the existing evidence base, a gap analysis to identify research gaps and recommended actions, identification of the available big datasets, a discussion of benefits and a feasibility study of open architecture. it also assessed any skills shortages, identified new business models and discussed the areas of the connectivity between policy agendas across government.
“In the transport sector – and particularly in cities – use of Big Data has the potential to realise significant efficiencies along with innovative new products and services, greater competitiveness and economic growth,” the report said. “Despite the great potential, the level of Big Data exploitation in transport is at a much lower level of maturity compared to other sectors such as retail and healthcare.
“The transport sector is a vast generator of Big Data – advancements in analytics, enhanced computing and improvements in connectivity through the Internet of Things have opened up the potential to combine and use these big datasets in new ways. The potential transport benefits could be considerable, and include greater predictive capacity, leading to better transport and land-use planning, new behavioural insights, better customer services, better network utilisation and performance in near-time and a reductions in accidents, pollution and energy use.”
However the report also found that the main challenges are not technical, but rather other considerations, including identifying suitable commercial business models that benefit all parties and that challenges are compounded by data skills shortages in the transport sector and fears that sharing data will breach privacy, security and competition laws.
You can read the full report here: