Geospatial Commission and Innovate UK announce transport location data funding for 28 companies

by Adrian Tatum

The Geospatial Commission in partnership with Innovate UK are funding 28 winners of their £2 million transport location data competition which looks at how location data can spark innovation and support the future of mobility for the UK.

The winners have been awarded funding of up to £75k across four themes of mobility as a service, active travel, supply chains and boosting capacity.

Smarter mobility solutions, underpinned by location data, will enable us to make the most of our transport networks by boosting capacity, reducing environmental impacts and decreasing travel times.

Winners across the four themes will develop feasibility studies to help create geospatial solutions to our transport challenges and support the future of mobility.

Mobility as a service – to help better integration of transport types.
Active travel – creating safer ways to enable active travel.
Supply chains – helping better distribution, storage and delivery.
Boosting capacity – increasing efficiency of transport networks.

Minister for the Cabinet Office, Lord True CBE, said: “These innovative location data winners will help the government unlock £2 billion of economic value in our transport sector to improve services, enabling the efficient delivery of new networks and transport corridors connecting people to the jobs they need, the goods and services they want, and the places they want to go.”

The 28 winners are:

Mobility as a service

Slingshot Simulations Limited – Digital twin platform to auto generate 3D models of Yorkshire and surrounding areas including transport within seconds.
City Science Corporation Limited – Using new open data to progress mobility as a service to influence positive travel behaviour.
Travelai Limited – Digital solutions for accessibility.
Modal Limited – Increase the adoption of mobility as a service through real-time detection of passenger journeys, delivering new services such as automated train delay refunds
CGA Simulation Limited – Scenario planning simulator to predict where infrastructure for transport will be required based on behaviour.
Ricardo UK Limited – Flexible geo-fencing architecture and implementation to reduce emissions and improve air quality.
Rural Technologies Limited – Ethical exploitation of geo data integration. It improves access to better location data services in rural areas to level up left-behind communities and enables pragmatic innovation in areas of foreseeable connectivity issues.

Active travel

Ngenius Limited – Convert CCTV to smart sensors to provide better data to support safer active travel.
R4Dartech Limited – Low-cost radar beacon to provide localised high-resolution geospatial data enabling enhanced navigation and surveillance in unsegregated multi-modal transport environments.
Space Syntax Limited – Tool to integrate local authority workflows with geo-spatial data analysis to identify priority areas and tailor specific active travel interventions.
Pragmatex Limited – Survey solution to support cycleway and footway asset management.
Pelation Limited – Automatically identify and analyse cycling near misses using the device’s video footage and data/Machine Learning.

Supply chains

Addresscloud Limited – A national suitability map of unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAV) landing sites for every address in Great Britain.
Dynamon Limited – This project will develop an artificial intelligence tool to identify the optimum zero-emission vehicles to replace a fleet of traditional diesel vehicles. Fleet telematics data will be combined with vehicle testing data to model real-world range, cargo capacity, and fleet total-cost-of-ownership, enabling commercial fleets to identify the best zero-emission vehicles for their specific operations.
Emu Analytics Limited – Analysis of shipping movements using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify evolving patterns of movement, leading to predictive outcomes for proposed future wind farm implementations.
City Science Corporation Limited – Pulls together all freight data to enable better planning to prevent freight blindness and empty running with route planning efficiencies.
Marine South East Limited – Streamlining the operation of consolidation centres that are being proposed to shift logistical interchanges from congested port city centres out to locations better connected to major logistics corridors.
Flock Limited – Development of its real-time risk assessment and insurance technology to larger and more complex fleets of drones, including last-mile delivery drones, with an ambition to support a dramatic reinvention of global logistics and supply chains.
Hydrosurv Unmanned Survey UK Limited – Using Earth Observation to provide better data to port authorities towards assisted seaport autonomy.
Iconic Blockchain Limited – A feasibility of a micro-logistics platform for last-mile delivery consolidation operations.

Boosting capacity

Hack Partners Limited – Using Internet of Things and Geo data to detect train movement to help understand where trains are and impacts of delays etc.
Mott MacDonald Limited – A project to build a real-time digital twin based on existing traffic models, this growing array of roadside sensors, and state-of-the-art Machine Learning techniques in order to be able to model traffic conditions on networks in real-time.
Reliable Data Systems International Limited – A service that improves estimates of train location through repeat runs over the same route. (GPS accuracy to within 1m).
Thales Transport and Security Limited – Deploying a geospatially based identification tool, capable of identifying track geometry risks early on and help manage response to minimise disruption to services. The solution will use in-service train data collected to detect underlying track conditions for analysis.
Prospective Labs Limited – A flexible Bus Priority System delivered directly through Sat Nav of individual vehicles to enable Local Authorities and transit operators to better manage the flow of buses, emergency service vehicles, public service vehicles, taxis and delivery vehicles (bus lanes) in a manner that ensures an unobstructed path for emergency response and daily transit services.
Openspace Group Limited – The system will use Geographic Information System (GIS) and artificial intelligence techniques to fuse existing rail datasets (including gate line counts, train loadings, ticket sales, and timetables) with geospatial datasets such as mobile network data, WiFi, internet of things sensor feeds and cutting-edge Lidar scanning, to generate a real-time decision support tool for the station operations team at St Pancras, improving customer experience, crowd management and operational efficiency.
Movement Strategies Limited – To create an artificial intelligence tool that enables city and regional traffic managers to forecast traffic patterns across their network in time intervals between 5 and 30 minutes ahead.
Comms365 -Using geospatial data from connected sensors and live dynamic data from electric vehicle charge points to provide real time information on the availability of electric vehicle charge points in managed parking spaces.

Transport Minister Rachel Maclean said: “From creating safer ways for people to travel, to improving our supply chains and delivery, data is key for innovation in transport to prosper. I’m excited to see how the winners of this competition can change how we travel in the future, making our journeys easier, cleaner and more efficient.”

InnovateUK’s Deputy Executive Chair and Chief Business Officer, Simon Edmunds, added: “I am delighted that Innovate UK is delivering this exciting competition on behalf of the Geospatial Commission. There is clear demand for innovative geospatial technologies to solve transport challenges and we are utilising the proven Small Business Research Initiative process to bring together challenge owners and innovators to deliver novel solutions. We had a very high response to the competition which was staggering and demonstrates the appetite for innovation in this area.”