Greetings from a new blogger! My name is Alexander Kachkaev, I am an MPhil/PhD student at City University London and just starting my research programme that is going to be related to intelligent road transport systems. I am very glad that I was asked to contribute my blog and in the future I would like to share some of my thoughts and ideas, talk about my research progress and also speak of some interesting places and events that I attend.
There are two things that make me different from many readers and writers of Thinking Highways website and magazine. The first one is that I am not a native English speaker (I am Russian) and the second one is that the field of ITS is rather new for me. Before I became a PhD student, none of my subjects were strongly related to transport systems. I studied at three different universities and learned Information Technologies, Programming, Web Development, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Economy. So until last month I could only see the tip of the iceberg called ITS. But even the tip was something to look at! Being interested in urban environment and living in London while doing MSc I started to see what ITS is actually for, or rather who it is for - the convenience brought to end-users.
During my first month of studies I have visited several interesting places and was glad to meet people working in ITS. That was a great experience! Many thanks to Andrew Huddart form City Collaborative Transport Hub and Andy Graham from White Willow Consulting who is the visiting fellow in the Hub.
For instance, I have been to the Barclays Cycle Hire back office and Trafficlink and really liked the way the work is organized there. I have been amazed by the complexity of problems people are solving and with the innovations and technologies being used. These companies can be good examples of how automation and IT can help operators to make decisions in real-time based on enormous amount of incoming data.
The cycle scheme in London is not balanced, which means that the bikes should be redistributed from time to time to avoid having empty and overfilled docking stations, especially in peak hours. It is a real challenge, which includes demand prediction, efficient routing and many other aspects. The scheme started working only about half a year ago, so there is no golden solution for this problem yet and a lot of research is being done now in different organizations. including my university.
Trafficlink is probably not known as widely as Barclays are for their bikes, but there are far more people using their product daily over the whole UK. It collects and processes traffic data that is then sold to TV and radio stations, shown on the web and used by police and government. The sources for the data are very different (from phone calls and texts from users to GPS tracks and images from cameras), and incoming information needs to be analyzed by operators to make the output accurate and reliable. Without the proper automation this process could turn into a nightmare but a set of offbeat techniques allows Trafficlink to cover the whole UK with minimum human resources involved. Bryn Mills who is a chief technology officer in the company shared some problems Trafficlink would like to have solutions for, so there is some probability that my research can be devoted to one of them.
So how is it to be new to ITS? On one hand it is very interesting to learn the hidden side of many things that surround you every day, and on the other hand the more you know the more you realize that you know almost nothing as the world of ITS is really huge. But I have just started my journey down the rabbit hole and hope that at the end of my research the results I will obtain will not collect dust but become something that can make the world a bit better.