UK: Government looks to back intelligent transport consortia

Funding available

The UK government wants to sponsor a small number of new multidisciplinary research and innovation consortia to enable UK industry, local authorities, research organisations and universities to work in collaboration to address key research issues in the longer-term development of the country’s transport system.

The Future Intelligent Transport Systems (FITS) initiative will receive up to £9 million. It is expected that industrial partners will contribute significant resources of their own to the research consortium.

The underpinning theme of the programme is to research ways of delivering better passenger and freight transport services, while at the same time reducing negative environmental impacts, especially the carbon footprint.

The five key areas are: Improving road network management (excluding road pricing); Improving road safety (by reducing collisions, casualties and deaths); Better travel and traveller information (matching supply and demand through better information so travellers make informed choices on when / how to travel);  Better public transport on the roads (supporting more reliable, more accessible, safer and more efficient services); and Supporting the efficiency of the road freight industry

These challenges and possible ways of dealing with them were identified in a government  Foresight project on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems.

As well as organisations that are currently involved in transport systems and related research, the government wants to attract companies who have not previously worked specifically on transport-related problems.

Many new technologies - for example, distributed networks of sensors, data-mining, agent-based software, modelling and simulation; advances in communications technology, speech interface and self monitoring complex systems - could form the basis of new transport applications.