The Indra-led Transforming Transport project has been awarded the prize for ‘Best Success Story’ from among the 42 projects that promote digital transformation based on data in Europe, developed within the framework of the Big Data Value PPP, a partnership between the European Commission (EC) and the Big Data Value Association (BDVA).
Coordinated by the Spanish transportation technology developer and consultancy, the Transforming Transport project involved 49 partners from Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. With a budget of EUR18.7m (US$20.8m) from the EC as part of the Horizon 2020 program, the project aimed to bring about a major paradigm shift in transport and logistics through 13 pilot projects to showcase big data impact in seven domains: highways, rail infrastructure, airports, urban mobility, vehicle connectivity, ports, e-commerce, and logistics. The Indra-led macro-project has achieved significant results that the participants hope will mark a turning point in the world of mobility, transport and logistics.
The success of the project is evidenced by the fact that some of the main infrastructure managers and transport operators in Europe that have been involved in Transforming Transport, want to continue using the solutions developed, due to the enormous advantages they offer. By facilitating the automated support of decision making, from big data and artificial intelligence (AI), the solutions allow the operation and maintenance of systems to be optimized; increase efficiency and productivity; improve the passenger experience; reduce energy consumption and polluting emissions; as well as facilitating the creation of new business models based on data.
Transforming Transport has made use of a total of 164 terabytes of data from 160 different data sources, with the benefits including:
- Improvements of up to 60% in the operational efficiency of transport and up to 50% in asset management;
- The ability to predict traffic jams two hours in advance, improving traffic management and reducing the probability of accidents;
- Reduce travel times for truck routes by 17%, due to route optimization, and the number of delivery vehicles needed for distribution in cities was cut by 38%, due to new data-driven planning tools;
- Using predictive maintenance, it has been possible to reduce the maintenance costs of railway infrastructures by 34%, also minimizing service interruptions and improving passenger safety;
- The monthly number of interventions in maintenance was reduced by 15% and the monthly polluting emissions caused by rail was reduced by between 15% and 25%;
- Ports have gained a 10% reduction in running costs, by avoiding delays and having more efficient terminals
- Airports optimized their use of resources by 33%.
The solutions developed in Transforming Transport have proven their validity in real environments and have clearly shown to the infrastructure managers and transport operators involved in the project the potential value of the data and the importance of their quality. In Indra’s case, the big data and AI developments that the company has carried out for the four pilots that it has also led within the main project, have joined the company’s range and are ready for commercialization. In particular, Indra has deployed in its own Mova Traffic control solutions, a new module for data integration, analysis and modeling, which helps decision-making to improve the operation, predictive maintenance and services provided to passengers across all modes of transport.
