German transportation software developer the PTV Group has signed a cooperation agreement with the company’s home city of Karlsruhe, which will facilitate the testing of future scenarios in a new, modern ‘Smart Mobility’ lab.
The goal of the initiative is to establish a real-time traffic prediction system for the Karlsruhe Technology Region, which will help enhance Karlsruhe as the leading Smart City in Germany and market it internationally. In summer 2016, PTV and Karlsruhe Mayor Frank Mentrup announced closer cooperation for the development of Smart Mobility concepts and systems. The company’s home city will now be the first to benefit from the new showcase lab, where new mobility scenarios will be created in cooperation with city representatives, and will be analyzed, simulated, and discussed using PTV software.
The implementation process of the project has been divided into three successive stages:
Phase I started once the cooperation agreement was confirmed by Mentrup, and was successfully completed within a period of only two months. A network model offering a complete view of the current traffic situation covering the entire road network in Karlsruhe was created on the basis of stationary detector data that was merged with floating car and mobile data;
Phase II will be completed in the first quarter of 2017 and will involve an estimation of the region’s traffic condition based on a dynamic model, which will help predict traffic in areas for which no data has been collected so far. Transport planners can thus simulate traffic scenarios, assess different measures, and are provided with a set of strategies that they can choose from for predictable events;
Phase III will be implemented over the course of 2017, and will include traffic prediction models for real-time traffic management and optimization of the road network.
PTV is an independent technology provider and has in-depth expertise in preparing and using appropriate data for traffic optimization. No matter what data sources a city wants to use, such as Inrix, Here or TomTom, they can easily be imported and combined with each other. New to the range is vehicle movement data provided by MotionLogic, a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, which is based on anonymized cell phone data that was used for the transport model and all 550 transport zones. PTV says the new Karlsruhre Mobility Lab is now the world’s first lab where new mobility approaches are tested using both historic and online data.
The lab’s interfaces to Karlsruhe’s town hall enable permanent exchange of information, so that the city can immediately benefit from the tools and data sets provided by PTV. In the future, interested parties from around the world will be able to experience the new Karlsruhe model for Smart Mobility in live settings. For clarity, the Karlsruhe city traffic management authorities will maintain operational control of the system and actual day-to-day traffic management.
