Lyon pilots system for real-time traffic insights

A first-of-its-kind analytics technology is bringing new intelligence to the transportation management center for the city of Lyon, France.

The system now being piloted gives transportation engineers real-time decision support on how to reduce traffic congestion and provide faster responses to unexpected events.

Lyon officials and IBM announced the pilot during the Smart City Expo and World Congress in Barcelona.

“As the city of Lyon strives to improve mobility for its citizens and become a leader in sustainable transportation, piloting this analytics technology will help the city anticipate and avoid many traffic jams before they happen and lessen their impact on citizens,” said Gerard Collomb, Senator Mayor of Lyon. “Using the data that we are collecting to make more informed decisions will help us to promote about how to resolve unexpected traffic events and optimize public transportation that is becoming a credible alternative to the use of private cars.”

While today’s traffic management centers feature sophisticated video walls and color maps of real-time traffic to illustrate streams of traffic data, they don’t yet provide full situational awareness across the whole transportation network. That means command center officials must use predefined response plans or make decisions on the fly … neither of which allows operators to factor current and future traffic patterns into the decision-making process.

“Today, transportation departments often capture real-time traffic data, but there is no effective way to manage and find actionable insight to act upon instantaneously for the immediate benefit of the traveler,” said Sylvie Spalmacin-Roma, vice president for Smarter Cities Europe, IBM. “With the city of Lyon, we will demonstrate how the transportation management center of the future will use analytics to improve the decision-making process, improve first responder time and get citizens moving more efficiently by better managing traffic.”