Building open data systems to benefit road networks

The proliferation of connected vehicles and sensors embedded into road infrastructure offer manifold possibilities to collect and analyze data to improve road safety, direct maintenance efforts and guide equitable mobility programs.

Creating of open data systems, where the gathered information can be safely and affordably stored, analyzed and shared, could help better transportation networks on city or even national levels. Incentivizing automakers to provide their data for the public good is only one of many challenges that must be mastered before these open data networks become a reality, however. In addition to data privacy and protection issues, the technical infrastructure, from data storage to cloud-based networking systems, must also be approved and funded.

“In the near term there are some technical challenges, and the biggest one, broadly, is the fact that everything is formatted differently,” said Brian Rhodes, research and analysis manager for connected car and vehicle experience at IHS Markit. “Automakers are even struggling today with multiple generations of telematics units, not to mention competitive platforms and those of suppliers weren’t developed together in any way. This is a fundamental issue.”

A second issue involves how to aggregate the data collected from sensors, which first requires determining how many aspects of the vehicle’s data lifecycle organizations are looking to collect. “Do you have a backend infrastructure to be able to map all of that? It’s one thing to have a sensor on the car that can do something, and it’s another thing to be extracting that data from it and storing it and mining it,” Rhodes said. “These are very expensive propositions, and they require significant use cases before automakers are going to want to put the money down.”

That need for investment points to a third hurdle: open data networks need a lot of data to provide sufficient insights, which means some automakers are going to have to step up to get the ball rolling. “It’s difficult, to be honest, to incentivize being first from an OEM perspective when it requires five more OEMs to follow, and then for those vehicles to sort of be on the road for a little while,” Rhodes said. “But I do still think one of the benefits we have here is that it would be a safety investment.”

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