News

AI Powered Awareness for Traffic Safety – a new SAFER associated project

Mar, 27 2021

The new project AI Powered Awareness for Traffic Safety (AI Aware) is a concept in the Drive Sweden Innovation Cloud to investigate and test central traffic control supporting connected and automated vehicles. The purpose is to build on previous bilateral activities to establish a strong project based collaboration between Singapore and Sweden in the Smart Mobility domain. Through a collaborative cloud environment we will research how AI can enable predictive awareness in a Smart City context. Flash Floods and Traffic Accidents are the two initial use cases that will be investigated, based on the respective countries’ priorities. 
 

Using various data in the traffic environment
The project idea is to fuse multiple data sets, both new and existing,  from the traffic system in a city and apply AI algorithms and other new pattern recognition technologies to be able to identify and predict different events in the traffic system. Focus is on identifying different types of hazards that could cause accidents and disturbances. 
The project has potential to solve the problem of unforeseen events causing accidents, lost lives and disturbances in the traffic system. The logic for realizing this potential is based on the following capabilities being explored in the project:
•    To identify patterns in data from the traffic system representing hazards.
•    To predict accidents. 
•    To predict hazardous road conditions such as low friction and flash-floods. 
•    To prevent accidents through preemptive warnings. 
•    The project further has the potential to provide new knowledge, technology and concepts when it comes to applying AI for predicting events in a traffic system and using collaborative cloud solutions for preventing accidents to occur. 
 

AI Aware

Many SAFER partners involved
By collaborating between traffic authorities, traffic management providers, map and location data providers and OEMs an increased level of predictive awareness could be reached. Also, by aiming beyond real-time the project has the potential to predict and prevent an accident from happening. The collaborative cloud infrastructure will be used for communicating warning messages and thereby preventing accidents and hazards from occurring. 

The project will develop knowledge on how AI can enable awareness for traffic safety and support connected and automated vehicles, which has direct impact on safe transportation and is in SAFER’s research interest. An AI-powered traffic management for smart cities is one of the deliverables, the other are workshops on data exchange and demos on two locations.

The project, that will be associated to SAFER’s research area Safety performance evaluation, will be concluded at the end of 2021. FFI, through DriveSweden, is the financier with a budget close to 8MSEK. Partners in the project are Volvo Car Corporation (coordinator), Zenseact, Carmenta, Ericsson, HERE Technology, Trafikverket, City of Gothenburg, Lindholmen Science Park.