Public Funding for Equality Council UK

"Automated valet parking (AVP) is a key feature needed in a level 4/5 automated vehicle. Users of premium vehicles don't want to care about parking and ""taking the vehicle away"" is vital for Mobility as a Service vehicles. The question is ""_where does the vehicle go?_"". Circulating streets is inappropriate, so parking is needed somewhere. Parking could be at bays on street, subject to legislation, payment terms and vehicle restrictions, but a vehicle may need to stay close to the pickup to reduce waiting. It could be parked off street some distance away, in bulk storage. And a traditional car park could transform into a drop off hub, releasing value in parking property for retail and residential. Delivering this requires filling gaps: 1. Knowledge of available spaces of the right size, routes to access and a payment mechanism; and 2. Ways to ensure AVP avoids the disastrous customer experience of receiving a parking ticket even though the customer thinks they have paid. This could mean pre-booking spaces not usually used for parking. Addressing this requires scalability and evidence to prove payment. It also needs a business model that links automotive to parking with suitable investment return, changes to infrastructure to support drop off and a data model understanding customer and road authority expectations. And it needs to be secure and compliant with new privacy laws. Our vision is a customer experience better than ""manual"" valet parking, and to support ""Mobility As A Service"" . The business question is: _How do we make large scale automated valet parking work for demanding customers in the real city, and develop a sustainable business that can be rolled out globally?_ Our feasibility study therefore focuses on innovation in: * Exploring AVP deployment in very different cities (Coventry &Westminster) with real world problems, based on car park operator (NCP) market knowledge * Capturing data for parking, blurring the line between on and off street, looking at how to get data into the vehicle to make parking decisions (Appy) * Building a business model of revenues, data ownership and liability * Demonstrating AVP in a complete data chain model and customer storyboard * Validating this against an OEM's global customer and business requirements (Jaguar Land Rover) From a 12-month study , the outcome would be an innovative business model for how AVP might run and changes needed, proposed standards for AVP data exchange and a global view of UK industry opportunities."

"AppyParking is creating the next generation Parking Platform(tm) that bridges the gap between big data, high definition mapping, Internet of Things and payments. Firstly, we use laser based LIDAR sensors to collect the Traffic Management Order data that defines the parking estate in a town or city directly from the road. Our platform solution offers local authorities and car park operators a Platform as a Service (PaaS) to manage their on and off-street parking and traffic management assets. including collecting roadside data on yellow lines, bays and signs using LIDAR surveys. Standardised parking data is then licensed to vehicle makers, mapping/navigation companies, connected car manufacturers and hence to drivers and other consumers . This holistic approach offers a complete and scaleable Smart City solution. In the short term AppyParking can dramatically save cites from congestion and pollution and save drivers time and money. Additionally, The Parking Platform can save UK tax payers hundreds of millions of pounds and dramatically increase productivity whilst preparing the UK's cities for the autonomous and mobility revolution."

Autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles have been hard to miss in the news recently, whether this be Tesla's partially automated 'Auto Pilot' feature, or the fully driverless 'Pods' that arrived on the streets of Milton Keynes in October 2016. As the technology becomes more familiar, people are becoming increasingly confident that individual vehicles will be able to drive and navigate themselves on roads and around people. But a single self-driving car is of limited value, it needs to work as part of an existing transport system – therefore conversations are now moving towards ‘how will they actually work in a city network’. Currently one Pod can move one person (maybe two if sharing), but it needs a trained safety driver to be in the vehicle, plus traffic cameras to monitor its every move and to make sure it does what is expected. This is expensive, so to make autonomous urban transport more efficient - while maintaining safety - we need to share this supervision between the Pods and external systems (cameras and humans). We aim to achieve this by using Swarm Intelligence (what bees or ants do when part of a colony) to enable real-time, collaborative supervision of pods – meaning individual Pods are locally supervised, not only by cameras or humans, but by neighbouring Pods in the Swarm colony.

UK Autodrive - Milton Keynes leading the way in partnership with Coventry and the motor industry is a large programme of work aimed at exploring and demonstrating the potential for autonomous vehicles to become part of our everyday lives. The programme, which involves the demonstration of road-going cars and lightweight self-driving pods designed for pedestrianised spaces, will be delivered on behalf of the UK by the City of Milton Keynes working in association with the City of Coventry. The partners in the programme include JLR, Tata, Ford, RDM, Thales (UK), AXA, Wragge-Lawrence-Graham, Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Open University, and the new Transport Systems Catapult. Consulting group Arup has devised the programme and will provide programme management and technical co-ordination skills.

SmartKlub and its collaborators will develop a free to use tool “Community Action Platform for Energy” (CAPE) in order to make it easy for communities and local suppliers to procure and supply energy efficiency or distributed energy projects at scale. CAPE combines various data sets, including satellite, energy and social information so that communities identify opportunities of highest need and impact for councils and community groups to act upon. By doing this, expertise and scale are socialised to allow citizens to address fuel poverty and sustainability goals without needing to become a lone expert, in order to successfully join the energy revolution. Suppliers (especially local companies with local know how) can then engage with a much larger group of customers with aligned needs, many times more cost effectively, without having to undertake mass marketing that has thus far failed. Suppliers simply pay a commission to access readymade projects. SmartKlub’s ambition is that CAPE allows many cities to scale community energy measures at a significant scale in order to achieve a tipping point in social energy objectives like fuel poverty and climate change.

As a place of technological and societal innovation supported by local universities, Milton Keynes functions like a prototype Future City Demonstrator. Building on its economic strengths and its civic vision, MK will integrate its city-wide systems to maximise enterprise and jobs growth, business innovation, research and technology development. Integration will include community engagement, energy, health and wellbeing, housing, infrastructure planning and regeneration, transport and waste management. Integration will build on existing innovative projects such as a smart grid, electric mobility and telehealth. Outcomes will have a positive impact on the urban environment, citizens' experiences and the quality of city life. MK is growing with opportunity and offers a future-ready city in which people enjoy living, learning and working and where enterprises can develop innovative services that help manage future economic, environmental and social demands.