The Role of Mobility in Smart Cities
By Shantanu Sonar, Karthik Jagannath & Shirsendu Ghosh
Looking at the heavily packed Bengaluru roads, one wonders how we could make the urban setting safer and more intelligent. More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas — even the Indian metro cities Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru host populations from rural and urban areas across the country. The population densities in these cities are very high. For instance, Mumbai has a population density of over 20,000 people per square kilometer.
This high density of people also means a higher number of vehicles on the roads. As the number of cars, 2-wheelers, and pedestrians increases in urbanized areas, so does the risk of fatal accidents.
On a more somber note, about 1.3 million people die every year in traffic accidents worldwide. Further, a growing volume of traffic leads to increased vehicular emissions, congestions, and an unsustainable ecosystem, impacting the healthy lifestyle of people.
Over 1.2 billion people spend over 50 minutes a day in a vehicle — much of this in traffic jams.
The problems and challenges of increasing growth in density and complexity of the population can be resolved with the concept of Smart Cities. These can be further addressed with innovative and emerging technologies coming to the fore.
However, there are particular challenges that we need to overcome for the sustainable development of Smart Cities.
A critical component of Smart Cities is the use of advanced technology in all aspects, including mobility. Technology convergence will revolutionize transportation, dramatically improving safety and mobility; while reducing costs and environmental impacts.
While we speak of mobility technologies, we see the future as autonomous, connected, and electrified. Concepts like Robo-Taxis, Personal Rapid Transits (PRT), Group Rapid Transits (PRT), Freight Rapid Transits (PRT), and many others would be a norm in Smart Cities.
What is Continental Doing?
At Continental, are already working together with several cities globally and supporting them with a range of ‘Smart City’ solutions. The aim is to make these cities even safer. With the overarching ‘Vision Zero — Zero Fatalities, Zero Injuries, Zero Crashes’, we strive to meet the demanding mobility needs of a wide variety of road users by being more environmentally responsible and efficient — thus, democratizing safety to the end-users.
NCAP Regulations and Driverless Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles will become an integral part of mobility in urban centers, helping to reduce traffic congestion and increase efficiency. This evolution towards autonomous driving goes through various Automation Levels as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) — Driver Assistance, Partial Automation, Conditional Automation, High Automation, and Full Automation. In other words, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) would be an enabler as well as fall back for High Automation.
These vehicles could be a great solution to deliver essential services or can be used for patrolling. They could create a new trend in shared mobility in the future. With the holistic approach encompassing the SensePlanAct philosophy, Continental offers ADAS technologies like Autonomous Emergency Braking, Adaptive Cruise Control, Blind-Spot Detection, Right-Turn Assist, Transparent Hood, and much more.
All these intelligent technologies making a drive safer would comply with regulations by NCAP globally and can be customized to regional NCAPs.
The technologies for autonomous vehicles that Continental has deployed in the form of the self-driving shuttle CUbE (short for Continental Urban Mobility Experience) is ready for series production and is already in use worldwide.
For example, in Singapore, it is currently being used in several pilot projects on manageable public routes and demarcated areas at company sites, university campuses, or trade fairgrounds.
City Fleet Management Systems
With many urban users preferring to car-share, city fleet management systems can provide users access to shared mobility simply and efficiently, with easy administration for the fleet operator and excellent usability for users and operators. Continental has successfully tested related approaches, for example in Asia, the US and Europe.
Continental today has enabled phone-based access for traditional rental services, car sharing operators, OEMs, and continues to expand into commercial fleets. Just in the aftermarket, we partner with mobility as a service provider and generate more than 20,000 virtual keys every day. In Kansas City, Continental and Avis Budget Group introduced a keyless rental experience providing seamless ‘access and start’ for customers in 2017.
Since Continental entered the virtual key business, we have generated well more than 20,000,000 of those in the aftermarket.
Intelligent Intersection
Continental’s Intelligent Intersection innovation concept would be a perfect fit for smart cities. It is an end-to-end solution comprising a sensor set for the intersection, the powerful sensor (radar, camera, lidar) fusion algorithms that generate a virtual representation of the intersection, and the V2X Communication units; that together exchange information between the intersection and connected vehicles.
While the concept is integral to protecting vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists, it can also support drivers in complex intersection traffic scenarios. In addition to safety aspects, the concept uncovers the potential for traffic flow improvement opportunities to ease today’s pain of congested cities.
While Continental’s first comprehensive Intelligent Intersection pilot was with Walnut Creek, California, further research deployments were added to further investigate the potentials of the concept, for example, in Columbus, Ohio.
Cybersecurity
Autonomous Mobility and Intelligent Infrastructure require secure connections, be it between vehicles or the surrounding environment.
A comprehensive approach involving the three pillars — Prevent, Understand, and Respond — is the need of the hour.
For this reason, Continental has introduced an incident response management system, which is an additional layer of security that immediately responds if there is an attack. This system was developed with the expertise of a startup — Argus Cybersecurity, which Continental acquired in 2017 and has since become part of the subsidiary Elektrobit. With Elektrobit, which specializes in embedded and connected software solutions, the security experts have already unveiled an all-in-one solution for Over-The-Air (OTA) software updates. Features like quick OTA update solutions can enable firms to react and install security patches to immunize their fleet against the attack.
Conclusion
Continental is at the forefront of mobility transformation. Smart City technologies like Intelligent Intersection, fleet management, and autonomous mobility solutions look at mobility beyond ‘vehicle’ technologies.
While we have successfully conceptualized the technologies required for Smart Cities, many of the technologies need to be adapted to the actual world and customized to local market requirements.
There is a need for a robust legislative push to ensure the sustainable development of Smart Cities. Policies requiring a robust regulatory governance framework regarding technical standards, data protection, or open data and data security are the need of the hour. Such policies will be crucial to ensure individual rights and establish sustainable smart cities.
