The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Data61 has partnered with Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of transport systems.
The Traffic Congestion Management program, which has been under way for a few years, is touted as “analysing automated end-to-end, multi-modal journey planning for operators and passengers”.
Addressing the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport and Cities’ inquiry into automated mass transit in Australia on Friday, Dr Chen Cai, leader of the Advanced Data Analytics in Transport (ADAIT) group at Data61 and the manager of Data61’s intelligent transportation system (ITS) business, said the partnership has seen the development of a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) engine for congestion management.
According to Cai, by using the tool, it is possible to model the impact of network changes or disruptions and then issue automatic journey planning information for transport operators and travellers.
“[It’s about] how to bring intelligence into managing next-generation congestion, with the key idea, instead of being reactive, which is how we used to manage events in road networks, we want to be proactive,” he explained.
“We want to predict what’s going to happen in the future from now.”
The work is centred on determining what is going to happen on the road, through using the information both organisations have accrued up until now, including real-time, historical, and passenger transport data.
“We came up with a self-learning engine, an AI engine, that can learn from what happened prior to this date,” Cai said, noting that this includes insight into thousands of accidents on NSW roads.