Ford and Autonomic are building a smart city cloud platform
Source: Tech Crunch on January 9, 2018 | Darrell Etherington
Ford and Silicon Valley-based Autonomic will work together to build a new open platform upon which cities can build out infrastructure communications, including connected traffic lights and parking spots, called the “Transportation Mobility Cloud.” Ford CEO Jim Hackett announced the news on Monday at the CES 2018 keynote kicking off the annual conference.
The platform is designed to help connect smart transportation services, as well as adjacent connected offerings, uniting them with one common language to help coordinate all this efforts in real-time. That means tying together personal cars with vehicle-to-everything communications built in, incorporating things like bike sharing networks, public and private transportation services, including buses, trains, ride hailing and beyond.
The Transportation Mobility Cloud will support location-based services, determining routes, sending out alerts about things like service disruptions, handing identity management and payment processing, as well as dealing with data gather and analytics. It’s intended not only as a kind of connective tissue for the forward-thinking services and vehicles that will make up the smart city of tomorrow, but also as a platform upon which new apps and services can be built from the heath of data available.
Ford says to think of it like “a box of Legos” with pieces that can be quickly taken apart and reassembled to build new types of assets and products to better serve city residents. It’s intended to be flexible enough to work with all partners, and to change from city-to-city depending on local requirements and implementation specifications.
In a blog post detailing the news, Ford suggests some possible uses to illustrate what the platform could do, including routing autonomous vehicles away from the most densely clogged arteries occupied by human cars in times of peak traffic, and rerouting cars on the fly to help reduce congestion, or even letting cities fence off ares of the city to restrict them to EV only zones in order to help mitigate air quality and emissions issues.