Dubai's Enterprise Command & Control Centre Sets Example In Urban Transportation, Finds Frost & Sullivan Study

Frost & Sullivan, the growth pipeline company, in its recent study on Global Smart Mobility Initiatives, benchmarked the transportation systems of leading cities like London, New York, Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, Dubai, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro on 16 key parameters. The study found that urban transportation systems in many cities continue to function in silos and are either not fully integrated or are still in the process of being integrated, possibly explaining why many of them still struggle with inefficient transport networks.

While most of these cities have integrated or independent command and control centres for their transportation and traffic management systems, these centres are discrete and are not integrated onto a single platform that can access each of the available transportation systems to enable operational planning at the city level.

The study revealed that, as multimodal transport in the world’s cities increases, a major challenge will be to find the most relevant and appropriate ways to coordinate and integrate these systems, make them available to the public, and promote the more efficient use of public transport resources. To learn more about this study, please contact Nimisha Iyer, Director-Marketing Communications, at nimisha.iyer@frost.com.

“Today, there is a real and urgent need for a comprehensive, scalable and fully integrated command and control centre, which enables city transport authorities to access each of the individual transport and traffic systems on a single platform,” said Subhashree Ramarathnam, Senior Consultant—Mobility, MEA, Frost & Sullivan. “This bird’s-eye view will empower them to better plan, operate and respond to both immediate events as well as to more long-term urban mobility imperatives.”

Key benefits provided by an integrated command and control centre for transportation systems include:

• Real-time access to data from multiple data streams through a single interface—a central source of information that can provide intelligent data and interdependence analyses
• Improved traffic flow and efficient management of public transport systems
• Working in unison to improve journey time reliability, reduce accidents, decrease costs, promote public access to transportation-related information, and boost the use of public transport services

Many solution providers, such as CRTM (Regional Consortium of Transportation for Madrid), DIG, E-Hualu, IBM, Siemens, Thales, Transcore, and WS02, can integrate the transportation systems through a command and control centre.

In the study, Frost & Sullivan benchmarked the above solution providers on 16 parameters, including number of input systems, ability to integrate number and type of transport systems, scalability, modularity, ability to provide static and dynamic input, historical analysis of data and real-time data feeds, predictive analytics and multiple alert categories, and scored them based on their functionality and level of integration. In the scoring system, each of these parameters is given points based on the range in which they fall. Solution providers were ranked based on the aggregate score.

Thales’s solution ranked highest, as in Dubai it effectively integrated all transport systems by linking multiple systems (30-plus in some cases) onto a single platform with the Enterprise Command & Control Centre (EC3), established by the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority.

Thales has been successful in coordinating the operation of various types of transport systems—metro, buses, taxis, trams, marine (water taxis), traffic, and many more—across Dubai into a centralised facility, integrating data from various transport agencies and transforming it into meaningful information. It identifies relevant trends and indicators to make proactive decisions and enhances the efficiency and safety of Dubai’s transportation system.