Detailed description (English): Growing street traffic is a key societal challenge of our times. Many hours of manpower are lost in traffic jams. The noise and air pollution are a danger to the health of citizens. ROSY builds up a knowledge and database, including data visualization and analytics tools to solve the following challenges:
1.) Cities already today have plenty of traffic-related sensors installed and perform regular traffic counting, either manually or by cameras. This data is currently used mostly to support municipal decisions on changes to the road signaling and to determine the current Level of Service (LoS) of the street network. The monitoring of the LoS is mandatory for cities. An above average deterioration of the level of service will trigger the responsible institution to install corrective measures.
1. a. The LoS evaluations are challenging and time-consuming. Many cities are now moving to external service providers for LoS analytics. There are only three providers of this service: TomTom, INRIX and google. The cost for this service are in the order of 50 k€ to 150 k€ annually. ROSY aims at enabling cities to comfortably calculate the LoS within their area of responsibility, to not make them dependent on large corporations.
1. b. At the same time, these cities also invest in extending their sensor and camera network to get more information of traffic data to be able to keep the LoS up. Analyzing the positioning of the existing sensor and camera placements in the cities we are active in, we see that the locations of the measurement points could have been chosen in a much better way. Analyzing the communicated sensor data, we see that up to 30% of the devices to not return meaningful results or are damaged. ROSY aims at enabling cities to monitor the performance of their traffic counting infrastructure on an easy to use dashboard and consult cities in the positioning of new infrastructure.
1. c. This data generated by the traffic management department could be used by municipal traffic officials to answer other questions in the area of duty of the traffic planning department, such as: “Are two construction sites on a vital road at the same time tolerable?” or “Will the change of a two-lane road into a one-lane road plus two bicycle pathways still hold sufficient traffic capacity to assure a good level of service?”. Many cities run traffic planning institutions, which often lack the required traffic planning manpower and sometimes the knowhow to answer these questions for larger, more complicated cases, tenders for traffic planning experts are issued. In many cases, these studies are triggered by external objections to city planning and need an urgent answer. In Germany, the costs for even a standard traffic analysis range between 20 –50 k€ and can easily reach the order of 500 k€. ROSY aims at bringing traffic planning and traffic management institutions closer together by making the existing data useful to both and offer an intuitive cloud-based solution for standards traffic engineering questions off the shelf at a competitive price
2.) Basically, all regions in the EU face the challenge that the aims of one municipality are not matching the aims of municipality close by. This is certainly true also for traffic planning and management. The consequences are experienced by commuters every day: when crossing the borders of administrative districts in densely inhabited regions, traffic jams occur at a higher probability. ROSYaims at providing a neutral, unbiased tool/platform for regions to align their traffic strategies based on the ROSY simulation capabilities.
3.) To our knowledge traffic data is rarely integrated into open data solutions.
3. a. The main reasons are that traffic data is a rather complex area that has withstood the efforts to being managed by various EU initiatives and data owners are insecure if the data they could share is correct. As individual traffic values are easy to be cross-checked by environmental initiatives by simple manual traffic counting, publishing un-consolidated traffic data can be damaging to the city’s reputation. ROSY supports cities and regions with an automated data validation tool that considerably reduces the manual work needed to check the validity of individual traffic measuring equipment and to provide the responsible decision makers with a quality indicator that helps them to decide to make their data publicly.
3. b. The few existing European open traffic data solutions all have more data providers than data subscribers. Besides the uncertain quality of an individual data source, the integration into an existing solution requires significant manual work. Although the European Commission has developed a standard for the exchange of traffic data (www.datex2.eu/) each of the 7 different data sources integrated so for in ROSY has implemented DATEX-II differently ROSY is capable of reading and integrating any traffic data format and returns the validated and harmonized data in a single format. In the longer run, ROSY wants to provide a European platform for the exchange of traffic data and knowledge.
Target group(s): 1.) Urban traffic planners.
2.) City traffic planning department.
3.) Traffic planning Engineers.
Objectives: During the project we want to achieve:
1.) Position ROSY as the new, European open data platform for traffic data
1.a. present ROSY to local, regional and national authorities
1. b. gather their feedback and optimize the ROSY value proposition
1. c. develop a sound business model for each of the customer segments and a growth strategy
1. d. start establishing ROSY as the traffic enhancement of OpenStreetMap(OSM). There is a large number of companies providing planning and routing services to logistics companies based on OSM. As ROSY can provide traffic data is its USP, there is a good chance ROSY can successfully to enter the market segment of logistic planning solutions.
2.) ROSY will be as good as the data that is uploaded. In order to get recognition as a potential national or European solution, ROSY needs to prove that its approach is capable of wide area coverage as opposed to showcasing its potential on small, distributed data islands:
2. a. get as many existing open traffic sources connected to ROSY
2. b. make trails with cities interested
in order to get sufficient initial tracking, it is mandatory that ROSY focuses its capacities on a small number of use-cases that prove the best revenue potential.
Expected Outcomes: European cities those are looking for traffic planning tools and consultants with not big budget in mind shall contact us for the demo and presentation at premises. We can further run the paid pilot project to prove what we meant.