Working Towards the Future of Mobility Through Our Involvement in UK and European Research and Development Projects

Working Towards the Future of Mobility Through Our Involvement in UK and European Research and Development Projects

Article written by Dr Sam Chapman

At The Floow, research and development is one of the most important things that we do. It plays a vital role in influencing our product development and it allows us to focus further on the future of mobility through helping our clients to prepare for the changes being brought about by new technologies, business models and legislative requirements.

We are currently working on a number of R&D projects to understand, inform and improve our product offering and mobility in general. You can find out more about these projects below:

MOVE_UK

MOVE_UK is a project part-funded by the UK Government’s CCAV department, which brings together six world leading organisations - Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, TRL, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Direct Line Group and The Floow - to reduce the timescale and cost of autonomous vehicles through live trials in real-world environments.

The three year project began in August 2016 and it is set to conclude in July 2019 with the third and final phase of the project currently underway. The project sees a series of Jaguar Land Rover trail vehicles driving to, from and around the test area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

Each vehicle has a multitude of monitoring equipment inside it which records driving miles so journey data from within the vehicle systems, new sensors and controls can be analysed to inform insights and analysis.

Photography by Julia Claxton, 2016

Why is the project important?

One of the objectives of the MOVE_UK project is to reach an enhanced understanding of behaviour from richer and more comprehensive mobility data than is generally available. The aim of risk estimation research is to identify new behaviour clusters and factors that can aid the understanding of the likelihood and outcomes of incidents or real risk scenarios.

In other words, existing telematics is used to seek new ways to distinguish journeys that appear very similar, but which actually present divergent levels of risk when viewed from the perspective of additional data.

Photography by Julia Claxton, 2016

What is The Floow’s involvement in MOVE_UK?

The Floow’s involvement surrounds the telematics aspect of the project and the analysis of data in order to understand the risks associated with autonomous vehicles. For the MOVE_UK project, we investigate data values to understand consistency, reliability and how potential future telematics products can be enhanced with connected car data.

The project’s influence on our product development

The MOVE_UK project allows The Floow to understand not only future technologies but also how we can test and refine our current cutting edge scoring for the benefit of our clients and drivers in general.

Ultimately, we see the telematics aspect of MOVE_UK as the most important for future development as the insights help us to better understand driver risk helping to strengthen our understanding of risk for those we work with (such as insurers, fleet managers and auto manufacturers).

The driver behaviour insights we have gathered, in this project and beyond, are beneficial for many including:

• insurers - helping them to price policies more accurately

• car makers - helping them to develop safer cars

• governments and local authorities - helping them to design road systems and make changes which will improve road safety whilst also helping them deal with the challenges of autonomy

To find out more about our involvement in MOVE_ UK, you can visit the MOVE_UK website [https://www.move-uk.com/] or check out The Floow’s blog [https://www.thefloow.com/blog/ move-uk-phase-two-report.html]

SETA

Birmingham, UK

Over the last two and a half years, The Floow has been part of a consortium of organisations working on a SETA project to create technologies and methodologies in order to change the way mobility is monitored, understood and managed in large metropolitan areas.

The three year project started in 2016 and it is due to finish in the first half of 2019. As the project is near completion, I attended a conference in Milan at the end of last year to report on our work to date to decide how these findings can be used to inform future decision-making surrounding mobility and transport.

Working on the project has been a consortium of 15 partners from five countries, including both Sheffield universities, Birmingham City Council, Knowledge Now Limited (all UK), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), 5T Torino (Italy) and Aimsum (Spain), with the project work focused across three cities in Europe: Santander in Spain, Turin in Italy and Birmingham in the UK.

Why is the project important?

The aim of the SETA project is to create technologies and methodologies to change the way mobility is monitored, understood and managed in large metropolitan areas to help relevant organisations effectively plan for the future of mobility and transport in their local area and make changes which will benefit drivers, mobility and road safety.

What is The Floow’s involvement in SETA?

The Floow has been involved in the Birmingham arm of the project, working across a 25km area spanning from the city centre to the airport, to understand urban environments and transport patterns in further detail. These insights will help us inform the cities of the future by making them safer, smarter and greener.

Over the course of the SETA project, we have been collecting and making use of anonymised data taken from a number of sources including smartphones, OBDs, in-car electronics, traffic lights and road and pollution sensors to gain a fully rounded picture of traffic, transport and mobility in the city of Birmingham.

By collecting and collating anonymised data from such a wide array of sources, it not only allows us to gain a clear picture of traffic behaviours it also allows us to replace ‘clipboard studies’ that rely upon manual collection.

These traditional techniques, still widely in use, are seen to be inefficient, costly and lacking in detailed data for making informed decisions regarding the future of transport and mobility in an urban environment.

The project’s influence on our product development

The move from manual methods towards more wide scale and evidence-led approaches using ‘virtual-sensor’ data allows us to understand behaviours evident on every individual stretch of road which previously would be impractical to try to measure.

This granularity of data provides us with useful insights into how traffic moves throughout cities, from main roads to junctions, to understand road usage patterns. These insights enable the discovery of simple and cost-effective changes which can be implemented by councils and local authorities to have a beneficial impact on efficiency and road safety for all road users.

Average speeds around Birmingham centre during morning rush hour

This has informed our product development and what we offer to our insurance clients by allowing us to gain improved understanding of different perspectives of mobility. It has also fed into our conversations with UK central government in meetings with various departments where our evidence and insight has been useful to help inform approaches to transport and infrastructure for the future.

It also influenced the creation of our DataFloow solution which takes our anonymised mass market data collected from vehicles and mobile sensors allowing us to see a unique picture of road and transport patterns. The opportunity to observe driving behaviours provides us with strong insights and important information to help with traffic modelling, traffic management, longterm strategic planning and the optimisation of mobility.

To find out more about our involvement in SETA, you can visit the SETA website[https://www.thefloow.com/blog/the-floow-setainform-future-mobility.html]or check out TheFloow’s blog [http://setamobility.weebly.com/]

UPLIFT

UPLIFT is a 21 month project, which starts in February 2019, to strengthen the UK’s position in the motor insurance sector building upon our telematics capability. UPLIFT seeks to empower improved and fairer insurance products to make mobility smarter and safer for all.

The UPLIFT project is being funded by the Industrial Challenge Strategy Fund and takes place across the UK to enhance the insurance industry through telematics by working to ensure fairness and a lack of bias when telematics is used for insurance purposes by ensuring the use of ethics and data transparency throughout the process.

Why is the project important?

UPLIFT has been designed to research new telematics enhancements to target strategic improvements in:

• Fairer risk estimation - to enable improved and fairer pricing

• Fairer fraud estimation - to add new aspects into support of fairer processing

• Enhanced driver feedback - to lower risk and improve care of the policyholder to strengthen insurer policyholder relationship

The project’s goal is to grow new fine grained understanding of risk directly from telematics minimising the usage of traditional insurance risk criteria which are less easy to justify and potentially unfair to policyholders. It also aims to enable fairer, personalised and easier to understand insurance products for drivers.

Photo by Gijs Coolen on Unsplash

What is The Floow’s involvement with UPLIFT?

The Floow is driving this project forward by working with an interdisciplinary group of experts from different backgrounds including data science, driver psychology and behaviour and insurance risk estimation.

The group are working together to ensure the project targets areas including:

• Bias identification and reduction

• Increased transparency and feedback to policyholders

• Improved protection of privacy for policyholders

• Strong ethical data handling

The project’s influence on our product development

UPLIFT allows us to focus on better driver understanding to improve and refine key components of our scoring algorithm. This will not only have a positive impact on our product growth but it will benefit our clients (insurers) and their customers (policyholders) by allowing them to better understand their driving behaviour through their journey scores and driver feedback.

To find out more about the UPLIFT project, visit The Floow’s website [https://www.thefloow.com/ news/floow-appointed-to-lead-new-drive-on-roadsafety.html]

ACUTE

The Floow has recently started work on a new project, called ACUTE, which aims to Address Congestion Using Telematics Evidence. The ACUTE project, which started in January 2019, is being funded by the Department for Transport (DfT) and will focus around the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

Why is the project important?

Congestion is a major problem in many cities across the world for a number of reasons including contributing to increases in pollution and travel time as well as decreasing the efficiency of the road network. This project is exploring how congestion can be reduced in differing ways.

The project is proposing a scalable solution which involves the reuse of anonymised journey telematics data from vehicles to gain a better picture of mass mobility including congestion across the road network.

The aim of this analysis is to build an evidence base in order to identify the root causes of congestion so appropriate prioritisations, mitigations and interventions can be applied in the case study area of Greenwich.

What is The Floow’s involvement with ACUTE?

The Floow is drawing on analytical experience of understanding fine grained data and large scale vehicle behaviour data. This project allows us to build a detailed statistical picture across all parts of the road network highlighting where vehicles go and how they behave on the roads, every hour of the week.

Further analysis will focus on understanding what road conditions are normal for an area to understand the characteristics which lead to congestion, ballooning pollution levels and greater safety risks in vehicular environments. The results of this analysis will provide us with detailed evidence on areas of road congestion including frequency, severity and causation.

The project’s influence on our product development

We believe the ACUTE project will have a big impact on understanding congestion and we hope it will be the catalyst for further research into this area. For The Floow, we hope to be able to gain beneficial insights into congestion and to further our already strong knowledge of driver behaviour through telematics systems.

To find out more about our involvement in the ACUTE project, check out The Floow’s blog [https://www.thefloow.com/blog/acute-floowcongestion-telematics.html]

WM-Air

The Floow has recently joined the West Midlands Air Quality Improvement Programme (WM-Air) which is being coordinated by the University of Birmingham in order to support the improvement of air quality and associated health, economic and environmental benefits in the West Midlands.

The project, which started in 2014, runs until 2023, to look at the long-term effects of pollution across many areas of the West Midlands. A study of this length has never been conducted in the UK before and the amount of data that will be processed over this time period will form an evidence base to inform policies in government departments including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department for Transport (DfT) to lower pollution levels in cities across the UK.

Why is the project important?

The aim of this project is to look longitudinally at pollution in the West Midlands area from 2014 through to 2023 to see how pollution is changing based on evolving vehicle technologies and changing driver behaviours. The project will also assess a number of initiatives which aim to reduce pollution to see which ones are working so that they can, if deemed successful, be rolled out on a wider scale.

What is The Floow’s involvement in WM-Air?

The Floow is involved in one part of this wide-ranging project and we will look at vehicle pollution and emissions from the tailpipe as well as the wear of brakes and tyres. We will be using understandings of mass anonymised driver behaviour on particular sectors of road to better understand pollution and driver behaviour trends in the West Midlands region.

By analysing this data, it will allow us to see where driving behaviours alter as a result of the launch and implementation of measures and initiatives which are aimed at reducing pollution, as well as understanding the impact these measures are having on pollution outputs in the area.

One such intervention are Clean Air Zones and one of which has been introduced in Birmingham recently. The zone sees polluting vehicles being charged for travelling through Birmingham city centre in an attempt to reduce the high levels of pollution in this area.

Many cities across the UK, including Leeds and Portsmouth, are also being encouraged to implement this initiative by 2020 in order to reduce the high levels of pollution found in multiple city centres around the country.

Vehicle pollution and emissions from the tailpipe

The project’s influence on our product development

The Floow has over six years experience analysing telematics data and working on a number of future-focused projects including some aimed at reducing pollution. As a result, we know that aggressive driving behaviours, such as harsh braking and acceleration, are not only dangerous but they emit much higher levels of pollution than driving more smoothly.

Our unique knowledge in this area allows us to make informed recommendations which will not only have a positive impact on the levels of pollution in a specific area but it will also help to curb dangerous braking and declaration events which impact on a drivers’ risk profile and the amount of risk on an insurer’s book.

As a result, the work we are doing on research and development projects such as WM-Air is not only having a positive impact on cities to make them cleaner and greener but it is also making them safer and smarter benefitting insurers, local authorities and all road users.

To find out more about the WM-Air project, you can visit the University of Birmingham’s website [https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/gees/ research/projects/wm-air/index.aspx].