MeitY launches Intelligent Transportation Systems solutions for traffic

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has launched several applications under the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) as part of the InTranSE- II program to improve India's traffic scenario.

An indigenous Onboard Driver Assistance and Warning System (ODAWS), Bus Signal Priority System and Common SMart iot Connectiv (CoSMiC) software were developed as a joint initiative by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M). Mahindra and Mahindra was the industrial collaborator for the project, the government said in a statement.

The government said that ODAWS aims to improve the highway infrastructure as the number of vehicles, speed on roads has increased, exacerbating safety concerns.

In around 84 per cent of cases, "driver error" was cited as the cause of the accident, according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways of India. "This assumes significance in the context of potential for technology applications for assisting and warning drivers in minimising driving errors," the statement says.

The ODAWS algorithm is used to interpret sensor data and offer real-time notifications to the driver, boosting road safety. The government said that the "ODAWS incorporates vehicle-borne sensors for monitoring driver propensity and vehicle surroundings to deliver acoustic and visual alerts for driver assistance".

Further, people opt for personal vehicles due to poor reliability of public transport system. The Ministry said that improving this is essential to attract more travellers to public transport, thus leading to a more sustainable traffic solution.

Besides, 'Bus Signal Priority System' will modify normal traffic signal operations to better accommodate in-service public buses. The developed system will minimize person delay by providing priority to public transport buses, either through Green extension or Red truncation, said the government statement.

In addition, Common SMart iot Connectiv (CoSMiC) will facilitate users and application service providers in various vertical domains to use open interfaces for end-to-end communication with well-defined common service functionalities, the ministry said.

"The horizontal silo architecture ensures interoperability and data exchange between different IOT devices and applications and avoids vendor lock-in," the statement said.

The statement further informed that CoSMiC complies with 12 common service functions which are Registration, Discovery, Security, Group Management, Data Management & Repository, Subscription & Notification, Device Management, Application & Service Management, Communication Management, and Delivery Handling, Network Service Exposure, Location, Service Charging and Accounting.