The Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITSS) Innovation Platform helps UK businesses develop innovative products and services in response to new market opportunities that may result from government interventions in transport.
Traffic congestion is a specific challenge because of its impact on the economy, climate change and quality of life. We take a broad view of congestion, and are exploring the wider issues around the mobility of people and the transport of goods by asking: ‘How can we move people and goods more intelligently?'
Through a series of strategic interventions, we will encourage private-sector R&D with the potential to improve efficiencies in the overall transport network and/or promote lower-carbon travel choices.
We believe that two approaches are needed to achieve this. First, taking a user-led systems approach, we need to identify and address the gaps in the UK's current use of available technologies and services. Second, we should analyse human behaviours and attitudes in this context, and find how to influence people's decision-making by providing them with the appropriate tools and information.
The ITSS Innovation Platform was launched in November 2005. It invests jointly with industry and other funders in projects that promote UK-based R&D in this area and strengthen the relevant supply chains within the UK. We will commit funding for new projects initially until about 2012, with activity on those projects continuing beyond that.
Future priorities
The priority activities for the innovation platform were identified from consultations with other organisations, and these activities are aligned with the five goals contained in the DfT's strategy for a sustainable transport system4,5.
We are considering activities in the following areas over the next five years:
- informed incident management
- informed safety
- informed vehicles and infrastructure
- better-informed public transport.
We will hold extensive consultations before each of these interventions, including workshops with participants from industry, academia and the public sector. These workshops will guide us in defining and working out the challenges to overcome in each area. So the above list may change as we respond to the messages we receive from other organisations, and to the lessons learnt from existing projects.
Our approach will also be informed by an ongoing parallel strand of activity within the innovation platform that seeks to better understand human behaviour and decision-making in the area of transport.
Future priorities: ‘Informed incident management'
In 2010 we will look at ‘Informed incident management', focusing on how to provide integrated and tailored information services that will enable a more effective and better-coordinated response to incidents in a disrupted transport network. This activity will affect all those involved in responding to incidents, or managing the impacts resulting from an incident; for example, immediate incident management teams, police, emergency services and the public. It will also consider how to deploy reliable and credible information to manage traffic disruption as a result of the incident.
The aim is to address the issues and barriers that prevent integrated systems and services being deployed for effective recovery from incidents, and where possible to use tools such as synthetic environments and response modelling to see how human behaviour and system architecture technologies can be balanced to reduce the time of recovery and impacts to congestion after an incident. In this context we view ‘incidents' as including organised events, accidents and natural weather incidents such as flooding.