Photo: Tony Miles

UK: A project to use mobile phone network data to analyse transport and traffic flows will be tested in a commercial environment as part of a government-sponsored competition. Innovate UK is to provide a grant to cover the proposed project cost of £1·2m.

Citi Logik is working with Vodafone Enterprise UK to develop a platform that can manipulate anonymised data extracted in real time from the Vodafone mobile network. This would be used to analyse movement of vehicles and pedestrians in real time, to help understand journey times, travel demand, road and rail network capacity constraints and operational efficiency.

City Logik notes that the mobile network is not currently used comprehensively as a system to analyse traffic movement in real time. The company has held discussions with potential customers including Transport for Greater Manchester to demonstrate the technology.

The project is one of 12 being taken forward under the government’s ‘first-of-a-kind technology’ competition, which has total funding of £18m.