TU Delft and Argaleo win EU project for mobility data solution

An international consortium of 20 organizations has won a new Horizon Europe project called EMERALDS. The project will develop a toolset for mobility data that will make processing and analyzing large data streams much easier. Besides TU Delft and Argaleo, the Dutch parties Mobility Innovation Centre Delft and Arane are part of the consortium, and the municipalities of The Hague and Utrecht are pilot cities for the project. The total project budget is five million, of which 700,000 euros available to the Dutch parties.

Every day in the city, many terabytes of mobility data become available about car, public transport, bicycle, air quality and so on. That’s great, but that data is only useful if it can be properly processed and analyzed. The goal of the new European project EMERALDS is to create a toolset, Mobility Analytics as a Service (MAaaS), that makes working with data a lot easier.

Manage, analyze and visualize

The toolset will enable road operators and other interested parties to collect and manage data of large size, high speed and wide variation. In addition, the toolset supports being able to analyze this data online and offline, use it for forecasting and visualize the results in a digital twin. All these services will respect strict European legislation, at all levels of the architecture.

The project will start in January 2023. In it, the Transport & Planning Department of TU Delft’s Faculty of Civil Engineering, Geosciences and MICD will work closely with digital twin supplier Argaleo and traffic engineering consultants Arane to develop the toolset. The toolset will be tested in the pilot cities of Utrecht and The Hague.

EMERALDS is a Horizon Europe project and stands for “Extreme-scale Urban Mobility Data Analytics as a Service.” The project budget is five million euros and runs for three years. The consortium consists of Inlecom Innovation (GR), Austrian Institute of Technology (AT), Trust-it (IT), Commpla (IT), University of Piraeus Research Center (GR), Atos IT Solutions and Services (ES), Universite Libre de Bruxelles (BE), PTV Planung Transport Verkehr (DE), Sistema (IT), Erevnitiko Panepistimiako Institouto tilepikononiakon systimaton (GR), Sia “Grupa93” (LV), Carto Geographic Information System (ES), Delft University of Technology (NL), Arane Advisers in Traffic and Transport (NL), Konnecta Systems (IE), Argaleo (NL), Riga Municipality (LV), City of York Council (UK), Municipality of Utrecht (NL) and Municipality of The Hague (NL)

EMERALDS’s vision is to design, develop and create an urban data-oriented Mobility Analytics as a Service (MAaaS) toolset, consisting of the so-called ‘emeralds’ services, compiled in a proof-of-concept prototype, capable of exploiting the untapped potential of extreme urban mobility data. The toolset will enable the stakeholders of the urban mobility ecosystem to collect and manage ubiquitous spatio-temporal data of high-volume, high-velocity and of high-variety, analyse them both in online and offline settings, import them to real-time responsive AI/ML algorithms and visualize results in interactive dashboards, whilst implementing privacy preservation techniques at all data modalities and at all levels of its architecture. The toolset will offer advanced capabilities in data mining (searching and processing) of large amounts and varieties of urban mobility data and its efficiency will be assessed, validated and demonstrated in three TRL5 pilot use cases (by following a co-development approach with mobility and city stakeholders to improve decision making in urban smart city environments), and deployed/showcased in two early adopters’ data-driven TRL6 applications (by integrating the new services to existing systems to improve commercial offerings).