Intelligent Adaptive Transportation

Intelligent Adaptive Transportation

DesignMind is currently collaborating with the Deakin’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, School of Information Technology and City of Greater Geelong to develop a new transportation network for Geelong. This is an exemplary project that uses Human-Centred Design Principles, together with swarm intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), to develop a highly intelligent and adaptive transportation network.

The main novelty will be approaching the concept of “smart mobility” not from a purely IT perspective, but from a “complex system design” perspective. To that end, the simulations of the new network will be followed by impact analysis of the proposed network on different components of the Urban Eco-system including its governance, environmental efficiency, economic viability and how it changes the behavioural patterns of its users – the public.

The research explores alternative approaches of designing and managing public transportation which is flexible, robust, smart, agile and more responsive to the aforementioned changes within an urban ecosystem. To that end, we aim to explore the potential advantages of adopting a de-centralised approach to the design and management of public transportation through the adoption of the principles of “swarm intelligence”.

A majority of people in an urban environment use public transportation services for work or leisure. Despite the merits of the state-of-art transportation mode are well reported in relation to reduced carbon emissions, increased safety, and reduced congestion, many people still do not prefer public transportation, in particular buses, due to the lack of flexibility and unreliability (e.g. traffic jams, weather conditions) and uncertainty (disruptions to the services). Although new technologies are gradually being adopted, mainly to improve booking or accessibility and for communication purposes, the main operational principle of public transportation has remained “unchanged” for over a century.

Many of these negative perceptions towards the current bus system are not necessarily caused by the nature of public transportation per se, but due to the ground on which this service was designed, planned and managed: the current system is centralised rather than distributed, static rather than dynamic. This means buses would follow a priori set routes within a system which is not responsive to the changes within or around that system, such as weather conditions, road conditions, user demand, use patterns, and temporary obstructions caused by various factors. When there is an outrage or latency in communication, it will cause problems as the system is not adapted to changes. To address this issue, we propose a self-organising and decentralised framework that can be implemented within a public transportation system. When there is a communication breakdown, for example, the de-centralized and distributed system will continue to operate in an intelligent way.