Nottingham City Council has entered into an agreement for Alchera Technologies to deliver a transport data platform for the region. Funded by the Department for Transport’s Future Transport Zones (FTZ) programme, the city has set out ambitious objectives to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution caused by the city’s transport network.
The deployment of Alchera’s AI-powered Data Hub is part of a city-wide initiative to introduce new technologies aimed at improving journey times for both traffic and non-motorised users of the city’s roads, building on a prototype previously developed in conjunction with the University of Nottingham.
Alchera’s Data Hub will create a single source of truth, ingesting the city’s rich sources of transport data, including fixed sensors, EV charging points, bus and train schedules and air quality sensors. Critically, allowing for fusion of disparate data sources to create a holistic picture of the transport network taking account for all travel modes, while supporting centralised storage of current and historic data to provide trend analysis over time.
Through seamless integration with existing systems and workflows, automated reporting coupled with deep data quality monitoring and data infilling will provide council staff with the ability to “self-serve” the data required to make informed decisions on transport policy, unlocking significant resources within the council to focus on further high value use cases for the broad sets of data within the platform.
A supporting public facing website for interested local citizens and businesses will also further democratise access to Nottingham City Council’s data, empowering citizens to engage with the council in new ways. Effective use of data is ultimately expected to deliver targeted investments that will lead to a faster, more reliable transport network generating fewer carbon emissions.
The contract award was subject to a competitive tender process, concluded in 2025.
Dr. Simon Dale, Technical Expert, Transport Strategy at Nottingham City Council, commented:
“I am pleased to be working with Alchera on this cutting-edge project to deliver a Real Time Transport Data Hub as part of the Derby Nottingham Future Transport Zone Data Platform scheme. Once completed the data hub will provide a unique capability with respect ingesting and managing real time data enabling a sea change in the ability to provide complex data insights in a speedy and easily accessible way. This will increase ‘productivity’ from our data sources by making them more accessible to policy and decision makers thus ensuring that we maximise the benefit of the new generation of real time data sources for citizens.”
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(Picture: Alchera Technologies/Flickr)
