Smart Systems and Operations
The concept of smart systems and operations is essential for enabling highly efficient transportation and seamless mobility of people and goods in cities and beyond. The design of such smart systems and operations requires high-quality digital communication infrastructure, sophisticated sensor systems, computer based modelling, data science, optimisation and artificial intelligence tools. The digital communications infrastructure that will support highly connected mobility within cities and beyond will be wholly reliant on the performance of both the wired and wireless communication systems and/or their respective sub-systems.
Predicted performance may differ greatly to real-world performance when systems contend for bandwidth. The impact of adding greater numbers of sensor systems, whose performance is reliant upon achieving and sustaining high data rates, into an already congested airspace could severely limit overall system performance even further. The competition over available bandwidth will only grow due to the requirements of an increasing number of smart systems that support autonomy and anything to anything communications. Therefore, additional capacity over and above the initial perceived requirements needs to be factored in at the early stages of design and certainly prior to deployment.
Computer modelling, analysis, machine learning and optimisation techniques need to be capable of dealing with highly complex and dynamic systems and operations. They also need to be combined with experimental test-beds to provide a full understanding of how systems can co-exist whilst providing the necessary and expected levels of performance. This approach can and should also be used for resilience testing to ensure that performance is assured as the operating environment becomes more and more complex.
Theme Leads
Dr Steve Greedy
George Green Institute for Electromagnetics, Faculty of Engineering
Capabilities
- 5G communication and connected vehicles
- Simulation of the interaction and integration between smart roads, rail and vehicles and their users
- Computer vision, sensors and sensing
- Control and management of transport systems (highways control, public transport, rail and ATC)
- Decision making, optimisation and Meta/Hyper heuristics
- Open data and data science
- Computational intelligence, machine learning, fuzzy logic, AI, algorithms and systems integration
- Evaluating safety interventions
Read our TMC capability statement (PDF) to find out more
Collaborations
- Electrical & Electronic Engineering
- Nottingham Geospatial Institute
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
- Architecture & Built Environment
- Digital Economy Research Institute
- Business School
- Laboratory for Urban Complexity and Sustainability
- Sociology & Social Policy
- Physics
Example Project: Collaborative Optimisation in a Shared-Logistics Environment (COSLE)
An innovative service to enable collaboration in a shared freight transport logistics environment, achieving more efficient operations by reducing empty freight runs. The research brings together location data, environmental data, GPS, vehicle telematics, optimisation, image processing, and mobile technology. The industrial partner is Microlise Ltd.