A major new £4.1 million research project aimed at reducing traffic pollution through the use of mobile sensors was announced today by Minister for Transport Stephen Ladyman.
The joint Department for Transport/ ESPRC funded MESSAGE project is at the cutting-edge of e-science and will bring together a consortium of leading international specialists in the fields of e-Science, transport, sensors, communications and positioning technologies across five universities, major industrial partners and transport authorities.
Sensors small enough to slip into a person's pocket, and others, possibly the size of shoeboxes, fitted to public buses will be developed during the project.
The overall aim of the project is to:
* use pedestrians and buses to act as mobile sensors, collecting vital real time air quality data.
* make effective use of the vast amounts of data to show how such things as the weather, street design and driving behaviour affect the build-up of traffic pollution.
* address issues surrounding the handling of very large amounts of very varied real time data from many sources.
* address the challenges of using data from mobile sensors to measure local environmental factors such as pollutants from vehicles.
* develop flexible and reusable sensors and a communications infrastructure to support a wide range of scientific, policy-related and commercial uses and applications for the data produced.
Stephen Ladyman said:
"The Government is committed to supporting research that will help to deliver real benefits in the longer term. The MESSAGE project will provide a much better, more detailed picture of the environmental impact of transport, allowing future decisions to be made on the basis of sound scientific evidence.
"We all now live in a data rich world and it is important that we have robust methods for handling this data, in real time. This project will enable the development of technologies to manage our transport systems as efficiently and Project Director Professor John Polak from the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London said:
"Our objective is to bring about a step change improvement in the data and analysis methods available for the measurement and management of traffic pollution. To achieve this, we must bring together a range of disciplines that have hitherto been separate. This is exciting and important science and we relish the challenge and potential of this work."
Dr Lesley Thompson of EPSRC said:
"This project is an important element of EPSRC's e-science programme. Transport offers many great challenges. We hope that this project will develop tools to tackle problems such as congestion and environmental pollution. The real time data handling methodologies to be developed by this project should have generic value wherever large amounts of data need to be processed in real time."
Bringing industry expertise to the project is European IT services consultancy, LogicaCMG. One of the company's senior transport consultants, David Hytch, commented on the research project:
"This research is a vital contribution to reducing the environmental impact of modern transport systems. LogicaCMG was invited to be involved in this seminal work in order to help turn it into a viable implementation at street-level; turning the theory into practice. With our extensive experience in the field of telecoms, mobile working and large scale business critical data management, and operating at the heart of a number of significant transport and location initiatives such as Galileo, LogicaCMG is well placed to provide an industry voice within the forum."
The project is being supported under the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) e-Science Programme. The value of the project over three years will be £4.1 million, of which EPSRC and the Department for Transport are jointly provided £3.5 million.
The project also has the support of nineteen organisations ranging across public sector transport operators (eg Transport for London), commercial equipment providers, systems integrators and technology suppliers. This support, worth £0.6 million, will include access to data, access to vehicles to provide mobile platforms for sensors, design services, and provision of technology prototypes.
Notes to Editors:
1. The consortium will be made up of Imperial College London (project leader) and the Universites of Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle and Souhampton.
2. Non-university partners and collaborators include include Abington Partners, Arup, Atkins, Boeing, Cambridge City Council, Gateshead City Council, Hampshire County Council, Highways Agency, IBM, ITIS, LogicaCMG, O2, Leicester City Council, London Buses, Nokia, NPL, Owlstone, PTV, Serco, Thales, Transport for London Directorate of Traffic Operations.
3. The Department for Transport's approach to Intelligent Transport Systems is laid out in "Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) - The policy framework for the roads sector" published in November 2005 - see http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent//groups/dft_roads/documents/page/dft_roads_610509.pdf.
4. e-Science refers to the science that can be done when researchers have access to resources held on widely-dispersed computers as though they were on their own desktops. The resources include very large digital data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation. A computing grid allows these different resources to work together seamlessly across networks, enabling people to share resources and form virtual organizations. The vision is to facilitate collaborative working by making computing power as easy to access over the grid as electricity is over the power grid.
5. The UK e-Science Programme is a coordinated initiative involving all the Research Councils and the Department of Trade and Industry. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council manages the e-Science Core Programme, which is developing generic technologies, on behalf of all the Research Councils.
6. The UK e-Science Programme as a whole is fostering the development of IT and grid technologies to enable new ways of doing faster, better or different research, with the aim of establishing a sustainable, national e-infrastructure for research and innovation which meets the aims of the government's Investment Framework for Science and Innovation 2004-2014. e-Science and the e-infrastructure are thus contributing to the economic success of the UK. Further information is available at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience.
8. Air pollution is a serious health problem and hastens the deaths of between 12,000 and 24,000 vulnerable people a year in the UK, according to a report by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants* "Quantification of the Effects of Air Pollution on Health in the UK", 1998.
9. Futher information on the MESSAGE project can be obtained from: Prof John Polak, MESSAGE Project Director Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College, j.polak@imperial.ac.uk
Prof Neil Hoose, MESSAGE Project Managert Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College, neilhoose@aol.com
Public Enquiries: 020 7944 8300
Department for Transport Website: http://www.dft.gov.uk/
