When technology meets energy, the result is bound to be explosive!
While working on assessing opportunities for "Smarter Planet", where primarily technology is leveraged to ease the pressure off the energy resources, I bumped into Smart Transportation. I thought I will give you a short summary about it.
Imagine this: Every vehicle on the road communicates with each other to gauge safe distances, communicating with the speed radars for speed limit conformance. Throw in the GPS technology and the data communicated by the vehicles can be further used for live traffic and congestion data. Adaptive routing algorithms can then empower your GPS to use the live data and show you alternate routes. This will not only save your commute time but also mitigate the occurrences of slow moving traffic which then translates into better fuel efficiency and better energy savings! WOW!
To take it to the next level, the data from different modes can be integrated. So if you are starting from home, you can log onto the transportation portal and see what combination of car, trains or bus etc will get you faster to your destination at that time.
These Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can help to maximize the capacity of the transportation infrastructure. This becomes an important takeaway, given the limits to the physical expansion of infrastructure owing to feasibility and resource availability. Transportation infrastructure is spine of every economy. With such high end technologies, we can also have a very close monitoring of the transportation infrastructure, processing real-time data transmitted by vehicles and infrastructure.
As you can guess, there are several technologies besides Information Technology that are involved here. It is "Telematics" – the basic technology infrastructure encompassing in-vehicle navigation, communication, information, and entertainment services For a wide spread implementation of Smart Transportation, it is important to achieve interoperability and cooperation from various stakeholders. This entails the government and regulatory authorities as well.
There are already several big initiatives in this space especially in US, Japan and Europe. The point is that this commitment needs to sustain over a long period. But definitely, this is a space of opportunities especially for applications that would work across different modes. There are several projects in this space that are based on open platform to foster innovation at rapid space. Not only the technologies involved are matured but giants like Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Hyundai, Toyota etc are playing an active role in getting these technologies to market.
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