A new data analytics platform has been released that uses billions of anonymized and aggregated mobile network and GPS data points to provide population movement insights to governments, transport authorities, city planners, retailers and advertisers. As governments invest huge amounts to reduce the impact of traffic congestion, upgrade transport infrastructure, and improve urban mobility, movement analytics creates an opportunity for its operators to benefit from lucrative new revenue streams. An industry analyst, Machina Research, forecasts the market to be worth US$1bn by 2020 for smart city applications alone.
Inrix has unveiled its new Population Analytics Platform, which is a data-driven analytical technique for monitoring the origin and destination of whole populations. Its power comes from the ability to understand not just where anonymous groups of people are at a given time, but where they have been, how they got there and where they may be going next. The Platform’s Origin-Destination (OD) facility provides an innovative creation of trips from cellular and/or GPS probe data, demonstrating population movement and flow in space and time. Provided in aggregated matrices in a spatial region, the system shows how people moved to or from that region and when. Additional attributes of that population, such as mode of travel and demographics, are also available. The Population Density facility provides real-time population density visualization based on the movement of probes in a given area, and access is provided through a web viewer for one-off events or for continuous monitoring.
Inrix has a heritage in delivering analytics services to the public sector. Its extensive customer base includes transport authorities around the globe, such as the I-95 Corridor Coalition in the USA. During the 2012 Olympic Games, Transport for London (TfL) was one of the first transport authorities to use Inrix’s movement analytics capability to analyze real-time population flow and density across the capital, enabling TfL to make better-informed transport planning decisions. “Mobile operators are sitting on a treasure trove of rich information and have started to explore the significant opportunities available to them if they are able to monetize their data assets,” said Rafay Khan, chief revenue officer at Inrix. “In pioneering movement analytics in the UK with our public sector customers, we have proven we can deliver accurate population movement insights through combining mobile network and GPS datasets and drive revenues for operators. By helping governments improve urban mobility and the efficient movement of goods and services in cities, operators can play a crucial role in smart city development. Our existing heritage in delivering data analytics to transport authorities globally, will help mobile operators to enter new markets, while taking advantage of lucrative new revenue streams.”
