Spanish company Indra, one of the leading global consulting and technology firms, will be leading the major European ‘Transforming Transport’ R&D&I project, which intends to be the tangible demonstration of how massive amounts of data generated by the transport and logistics sector can be exploited in an innovative way using state-of-the-art big data technologies to improve the management of mobility and services rendered to users.
The project is one of the largest funded by the European Commission (EC) within the framework of its Horizon 2020 program, both in terms of budget, €18.7m (US$20.1m), as well as with the participation of 47 partners from Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain, including some of Europe’s leading infrastructure managers and transport operators.
Transforming Transport includes 13 pilot projects that will be implemented in several countries and in different areas of transport: roads, airports, ports, rail infrastructures, sustainable connected vehicles, integrated urban mobility and logistics. In each of these areas, new algorithms will be developed and tested, based on existing big data technologies, that allow for integrating and analyzing real data from diverse sources, developing transport patterns, and exploiting these in a way that is most suitable for decision making.
For example, Valladolid in Spain will implement one of the pilot projects on urban mobility; France, on the connected vehicle; Greece, on airport passenger flow; the UK, on rail transport; Portugal, on highways; and Germany, on logistics at ports. One of the project’s additional goals is for the results achieved by these pilot projects to be reusable and replicable, even after the formal end of the project, for which over 120 key actors from the European industry will become involved.
The three main advantages that big data may contribute to the transport sector, and which the Transforming Transport project will address, are the improvement of efficiency, services rendered to clients, and the possibility of generating new revenues or business models. It is calculated that the use of big data may improve operational efficiency of processes and services linked with transport by, at least, 15%, optimizing the use of resources and reducing maintenance costs, fuel consumption or incidents, among others.
Indra will lead the Transforming Transport project, with participation from its Minsait business unit that responds to the challenges posed by digital transformation. The company will also lead four of the pilot projects:
• A high-speed rail project between Cordoba and Malaga, in Spain;
• A project at Athens International Airport, based on big data, to optimize all its operations and management;
• Two projects on smart roads to be developed in Spain and Portugal with the collaboration of Cintra and Ci3, with the goal to validate the use of data to improve the management of the roads’ capacity, reduce accidents, optimize available resources, decrease operating costs and mitigate possible traffic jams. Mobility patterns on the corridors in Malaga and Portugal will be used to develop and validate tools for managing traffic information and make short-term predictions on expected demand and flow of vehicles.
