Mobi

We all feel urban roads growing more and more congested every day – on our daily commute to work, on our way to a large event, event while waiting for a delivery. Mobility demand continues to rise, unfortunately the capacity available on road networks to support it has fallen short – cities are not providing the quality of service necessary for their economies to thrive. With rising frustration of travelers and increasing economic loss to traffic jams, road authorities have come to understand that building more roads is not the answer and offering alternative modes of transport is not enough – they need to transform how traffic is fundamentally managed.

How do cities and transport authorities manage traffic on the road network Is it managed as efficiently as how air traffic controllers manage aircraft and airspace? Is it managed as well as computer, water, power or communications networks? It turns out that road network management is far from efficient or optimal. Simply put, roads are not managed as a network at all. Without network level situational awareness, authorities are forced to operate in reactive mode by mitigating congestion only after it’s already emerged and by activating relief plans limited to an intersection, junction, or street segment. All too often, authorities may mitigate traffic at one intersection, but inadvertently create congestion in another – ultimately degrading performance of the entire road network. It's all too little and too late.

Road authorities now understand that they need to upgrade their traffic management capabilities - transform their operations from simply reacting to congestion to proactively managing and optimizing the performance of the entire road network.

Mobi has created a solution to support this traffic management transformation for both cities and business operators impacted by chronic congestion in high demand areas of interest. We’ve developed a turnkey, AI-powered SaaS solution that equips policy makers, transportation planners and traffic controllers with the ability to proactively manage today’s road network and be prepared for tomorrow’s connected-vehicle ecosystem. With real-time predictive alerts, optimization algorithms and AI (Artificial Intelligence) actionable insights, the platform enables to detect emerging gridlocks, pinpoint their root cause, and take preemptive actions to unlock the grid. 

On top of smart city and state stakeholders, Mobi's future growth plans also include utilization of its platform to enable cross-sale and up-sale to major MaaS (Mobility as a Service) players and marketing of its products to adjacent verticals, including retail and homeland security.

The Need

Public road operators today don’t have the necessary actionable insights to proactively manage traffic flow, resulting in:

• Lost productivity- amounting to more than $87B for the US alone, with 97 hours per year lost to congestion for every US driver, increasing road rage as well as growing harmful carbon emissions.
• Total gridlock - predicted in major cities by 2030 and traffic jams across the road network only getting worse – largely driven by increasing private vehicle and ridesharing use, declining corridor capacity, and dated traffic control systems.
• Increasing operating costs – Cities are spending more to maintain road networks. Businesses can’t effectively manage traffic around specific areas of interest such as venues and ports, resulting in customer frustration and increased operating costs for all parties in the supply chain.  

Today, traffic control centers (TCC) are managing the road network by eyeballing traffic monitors and accessing limited traffic data, "guesstimating" congestion emergence, activating relief plans after congestion has already accumulated and hoping the relief plans work. They are held back from addressing congestion and improving quality of service at a network level, and decision making is dependent on a narrow-field view of the traffic road network, lack of detection and deduction capabilities, restricted single-point solutions and no KPIs (Key Performance Indexes) to drive their learning forward.

The Solution

Mobi's AI-driven SaaS platform is driving a total digital transformation of traffic management for nation-states, cities, and businesses all over the world.

• Empowering road authorities to improve travel-time reliability by forecasting congestion build-up across the road network, and recommending congestion relief plans – designating optimized course of action to support all core traffic and demand management scenarios (routine traffic flow, planned event, restricted zone, construction zone, traffic incident and road weather management). For example, Mobi provided rich traffic analytics with performance and behavior metrics for managing transportation in Haifa – continuously monitoring and presenting situational awareness on the city’s belt, main corridors, tolled tunnel and the harbor, hospital and industrial areas of interest.
• Empowering freight truck operators to reduce truck call turn-time by optimizing truck routes headed to ports and remotely automating security, safety, and other required checks inside the port. For example, Mobi provided optimization-driven and V2X-based traffic direction in several POCs, enabling Origin-Via-Destination route & departure time control, adhering to minimum network congestion target function in the context of truck mobility towards Haifa harbor and minimum wait times of trucks crossing the Canada-US border.
• Empowering business operators in specific areas of interest (e.g. land/sea/airport, sport, entertainment, industrial, academic, healthcare or logistic zones), partnering with cities to preempt congestion during high demand and radically improve customer satisfaction. Mobi provided real-time actionable insights for traffic control and comprehensive analytics for action planning, facilitating Renew Atlanta's downtown area traffic operations in over 100 events, including Super Bowl LIII.

The Technology

Mobi has developed a turnkey, AI-powered SaaS platform (we call it Traffic Management as a Service - TMaaS). The platform's key technological strengths are threefold:

• Addressing traffic congestion on a network scale – situational awarness reports, traffic analysis and optimization-based solutions to reduce congestion at various resolutions, from the entire network and traffic areas within it, from origin to destination, to sections and intersections.
• Presenting data-fusion-based performance indexes - Moving from traffic data to performance metrics to enable network status forecasting capability, examining trends, assessing degree of impact (before / after), and evaluating different alternatives of action.  
•  Implementing AI across the product board – from UX and alerts, to network optimization and dynamic control reports.

The platform enables the traffic control center to:

1. Maintain continuous mobility situational awareness. Mobi's IoT network is comprised of multi RF sensors, cameras with edge-computation video analytics and dedicated short-range communication (V2I –vehicle to infrastructure) to attain vehicle count, trace, classification and communication. Additionally, the TMaaS platform fuses data from additional sources (e.g. cellular, application and legacy system data), composing multi-faceted trip profiles and providing full-spectrum of traffic indicators across all network scales.
2. Receive real-time predictive alerts relating to emerging congestion. Mobi's performance indexes provide network level-of-service analytics in real time, and enable machine-learning based predictive alerts to pinpoint problem emergence source, target and root cause.
3. Obtain recommendations to prevent congestion and optimize traffic across the network. Mobi's optimization engine combines an AI-driven network state and simulation-driven network playbook approaches to deliver traffic relief plan recommendations at network scale. The platforms open architecture enables the development of traffic relief plans covering all modes of transportation and supporting both recurring and non-recurring traffic conditions. Additionally, the platform is highly interoperable thereby enabling easy integration with organizational and infrastructure systems.
4. Measure action plan effectiveness and self-learn. Mobi's continuous impact assessment enables self-learning capability, comparative analysis between similar traffic conditions, before/after-action network performance evaluation and assigning a score to traffic events with similar characteristics.

Mobi's solution has a variety of unique features:

Mobi in the Media

Super Bowl 2019 with Mobi (left) vs. Super Bowl 2020 without Mobi (right)