Can Artificial Intelligence help in organizing India’s Road Transportation and Infrastructure?

An Uber study states that 1.44 Lakh Crore rupees are how much we waste just due to traffic congestions here in India. Will India’s road transportation improve? If we could avoid that wastage completely this year, how would it reflect in India’s GDP and Budget plans for 2019?

Existing technologies for managing the Transport Infrastructure will become inefficient as traffic rapidly grows to make road networks & flows more complicated. Research suggests such large-scale Transportation Systems can be managed effectively by combining the existing infrastructure of Satellite Imagery, geospatial analytics, and the newer technologies of Machine Learning.

An advanced Data Analysis Framework will help us plan infrastructure upfront, conduct maintenance with real-time updates, and reduce delays/deaths greatly for the next few decades. Other than the availability of high-quality data, there are two major parts to this framework that will get us there:

1. Technology: India being a large country, will need to gather huge amounts of data and store it efficiently using the tools of Big Data. The processing of this data to get the correct output is the harder part — traffic patterns change in different seasons, states, and disaster-affected areas. Artificial Intelligence will help us develop self-learning algorithms to get the correct output any day in the unpredictable future.
2. People: The ground reality is that a team of intelligent people with many years of experience can solve any real-world problem better than any Artificially Intelligent system today. Creating public-private partnerships guided by a central authority can help our talented people leverage advancements of technological innovations to predictably monitor and manage infrastructure on a large scale.

Such a framework can analyze the Complexities of road transport and derive Valuable Insights in optimizing logistics and freight services to help our nation become the world’s most efficient logistical network further accelerating our economic development that will directly show up in GDP growth figures every year.

Applications of AI & Data Science in organizing India’s road transportation

Predictive Infrastructure Maintenance: Real-time updates of needed maintenance activities to teams using AI-powered predictive analytics. Well-maintained roads through season-based risk profiling and modeling. Quickest disaster management using disaster relief logistics planning.
Optimized Road Network Connectivity: Reduce transit delays, accidents, traffic jams using object scanning and counting algorithms at junctions and toll booths.
Efficient Traffic Flows: Smoother changes in traffic flows and route profiles by real-time predictions of driver behavior with changing conditions throughout the day and the year.
Improved Infrastructure Planning: Planting more trees in high pollution zones detected from satellite image processing. Efficient travel and reduced pollution by rerouting traffic optimally. Automated management of parking spots and parking ticket collection. Increased Visibility and Safety of drivers and passengers by making Street Light adjustments based on changes in weather.

Advantages:

More roads can be repaired and maintained with the same budget allotted to PWD and NHAI because they can prioritize their work plans to give maximum industrial productivity in each region
Reduced Transit Delays for Logistics and Very Low Accidents caused by broken roads as Road maintenance teams get job tasks as soon as roads start breaking up
More vehicles can be driven in existing roads with decreased traffic jams by optimized routing and real-time changes in routing for changes in weather
Faster inter-state and inter-city traveling during peak hours through highways built under BOT terms as waiting at toll booths is no longer needed
Maximum safety to drivers, passengers, and freight carriers by increasing visibility of roads automatically during bad weather conditions
Significant impact on the environment by planting more trees in high pollution zones
Increased GDP growth every year until 2030 by using AI-powered transport network and infrastructure

How many Lakhs of Crore Rupees will India save every year until 2030? What will we do with it? Can the GDP projections be really different than projected in this graph?

References: