Artificial intelligence – a key to sustainable smart cities and mobility
Cities and transport are major contributors to CO2 emissions. FCAI’s recent webinar brought industry and academia together to discuss the need for new sustainable solutions, enabled by artificial intelligence.
We need new solutions for ecological, social, and economic sustainability. The issue is of critical relevance for the international community, and the UN has defined 17 sustainable development goals that demand immediate action.
Artificial intelligence plays a very important part in each of them, says Laura Ruotsalainen, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, HELSUS, and FCAI.
According to Heikki Ailisto, Research Professor at VTT and Lead of FCAI’s Industry and Society Program, sustainability is a phenomenon whose different aspects are each of them complex in their own right, and even more so in their interplay. It is hard to make mathematical, systemic, or societal models that consider all relevant variables simultaneously.
AI, however, can do that. It has been successfully used to optimize, simulate, and control similar complex settings, for example in the energy sector and medical industry.
Shared data and common infrastructures support development
Our current mobility systems are far from sustainable. Transport is one of the most polluting sectors, and also a threat to our security. 1.35 million people are killed in road traffic accidents every year, and 93% of these accidents are caused by driver error. In addition, transportation is not equally available for everyone.
AI could revolutionize this. It enables, among other things, optimized routing, new transportation modes, and autonomous driving. All this can help to cut down emissions, improve our safety, and enhance equal mobility.
But we need data to make this happen. And not just any data, but data that is reliable, non-biased, fairly shared, and that guarantees our privacy. Moreover, we must be able to fuse data from different sources, Ruotsalainen says. AI and deep learning methods provide means for this. There are also on-going international initiatives to get rid of silos and assure common practices for sharing and using data, says Outi Keski-Äijö, Head of the AI Business program at Business Finland.
According to Juha Salmelin, Lead of LuxTurrim5G at Nokia, we need a neutral city network to serve as a digital backbone for smart cities, and a neutral hosted data platform for creating new digital services on top of it. In LuxTurrim5G Ecosystem, 26 partners work together to build a solution based on flexible, modular smart poles with shared 5G small cells and a platform for local data. A pilot project in Kera, Espoo currently includes a 1.5-kilometer route of 19 smart poles, 2 smart stops, an autonomous vehicle and 250 IoT devices. The technology is ready, but innovations are needed to utilize it for new digital services, Salmelin says.
A shift towards mobility as a service and electrical vehicles
Technological development based on AI is not enough unless we have a service that can be sold, says Sampo Hietanen, CEO at MaaS Global Oy. Cutting down carbon emissions in smart cities requires a shift away from private car ownership, but owning a car gives us freedom to go anywhere, anytime. If we could have a similar service level for mobility as a service, 38% of people would be willing to give up their car.
Given that 20% of household expenditure goes to mobility, this opens up great business opportunities. This same money could be used to buy mobility as a service at flat rate. The service should cover 100% of the users’ needs, which requires access to all different modes of transport.
The good news is that these physical elements already exist. We just must combine them digitally, Hietanen says.
Another transformation is going on with electrical vehicles. Their number is expected to grow exponentially, also in public transportation, logistics, and many city utility services.
This means challenges for how to properly schedule the battery charging, says Yancho Todorov, Senior Scientist at VTT. His team is developing a new project concept together with Aalto University. This concept brings the VTT Smart eFleet solution for system level simulation of electric fleets and cutting-edge AI to handle this complex landscape. It also brings together all the stakeholders for the purpose of building a systematic prototype for commercial charging scheduling optimization.
This solution will rely on an AI-assisted design framework, says Sebastiaan De Peuter, Doctoral candidate at Aalto University. AI will support the designers in their decision-making and give them recommendations. When the AI learns the goals of the decision-maker, this can be very helpful.
Relevant partners and stakeholders are needed to push the project developments further. Both VTT and Aalto would be happy to find interested partners for collaboration.
Sustainable mobility – distant future or soon-to-be reality?
The speakers and panelists gave important insight on the challenges and possibilities of sustainability in smart cities. High-quality data and new AI methods are at the core of new solutions, and close cooperation between industry, research and regulators is needed to accelerate this development. Open interaction will help identify bottlenecks and opportunities, and bring this distant future closer to our reality today.