Belgian High Tech enables Smart Mobility

A consortium of companies including IBM, NXP, Mobistar, Touring, Volvo, Transport & Mobility Leuven and Magicview held a demonstration of Smart Mobility today.  By means of a test drive between Brussels and Louvain, they showed the scalable technology that the government (national, regional or local) can use in the future to guide its mobility policy. This showcase of Belgian R&D introduces a new intelligent platform that can host a wide range of mobility solution, such as e-call and road charging. In addition, the open platform can also provide a range of additional value added services to drivers.

The test vehicle contains the On Board Unit (OBU), an ATOP chip developed by NXP that combines positioning and wireless communication. The OBU receives signals from GPS satellites and calculates the location of the vehicle. When necessary the system can transmit an accurate position of the vehicle to the emergency services. This will save precious minutes and reduces the number of traffic fatalities. The cars that are driving towards the accident also receive a signal. Based on the e-call signal, the OBU advises the driver to adjust his/her speed or to take an alternate route, thereby reducing the traffic jams that occur around accident sites. The handling of e-call signals is provided by Touring.

The continuous positioning of the vehicle is also used for road charging. Via the Mobistar mobile GPRS network the location of the vehicle is transmitted to the IBM back-office. The GPS coordinates are matched to a map and the price is calculated. The test showed that it is perfectly possible to assign a price based on road type, time, distance travelled and environmental characteristics of the vehicle. In the future, road charging will be used to have every individual vehicle pay ‘fairly’ for the use of the road network, on both main roads and secondary byways. Mobistar offers connectivity for the Machine-to-Machine applications and is leader in this segment in Belgium. Mobistar has been selected as ‘International M2M Center (IMC)’ for ‘Machine-To-Machine connectivity’ within the France Télécom group. For the development of the system, IBM drew on worldwide experience related to paying for mobility. The company is also helping cities such as London, Singapore, Brisbane and Stockholm in dealing with traffic and traffic-jam issues.

The platform is open to bring additional services beyond e-call to the vehicle: such as locating available parking places in a city, paying for parking, pay-as-you-drive insurance systems, etc.

Road charging is only one component of a much larger and more integrated whole. The introduction of road charging has an immediate effect on driver behaviour, as shown recently by a test in Eindhoven. The ultimate objective of ‘Intelligent Mobility’ is a personalised offering via a multimodal transport system (roads, public transport, etc.) that offers drivers the least expensive route. It goes without saying that the Belgian mobility system must be drastically improved in order to deal with the negative effects on the economy, health and environment and also to strengthen the logistics position of Belgium in Western Europe. With Benelux-wide road charging, we can objectively charge the costs of mobility and invest the returns in deal with the mobility issues.

With this test, IBM, Touring, Mobistar, and NXP are showing the various levels of government in Belgium that they are ready for the challenge.

For more information

IBM: Ibm.com/be

Mobistar: corporate.mobistar.be

NXP: nxp.com

Touring: touring.be

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