Bringing Transport 5.0 to Ireland
Bidisha Ghosh, Associate Professor of Civil Structuring and Environmental Engineering at Trinity College Dublin and chair of the Irish Transport Research Network, speaks to eolas about Transport 5.0 and how it will help Ireland and Europe move towards sustainable, human-centric modes of transport.
“Transport 5.0 is a term for the bringing together of Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0. Industry 5.0 is the future, where we will be going very soon,” Ghosh explains. “Industry 5.0 will contain mass customisation and cyber physical cognitive systems. The word cognitive is quite important here, it brings us to the realm of AI and how it will interact with cyber and physical space and how we can give better benefits to society through customisation. When we go to Industry 5.0 — augmented reality, big data etcetera — we need to think about horizontal and vertical system integration, which we haven’t achieved to the extent we would like.”
The change to Transport 5.0 is coming fast, Ghosh says, with Europe moving towards a “sustainable, human-centric industry”. To this end, the European Commission has published its AI White Paper, as an information guide on how AI should be utilised, and its European Skills Agenda, which says that European workers should be reskilled or upskilled to allow them to play a role in this digitalisation agenda and benefit from it.
The key to the successful implementation of Transport 5.0 is the consideration of societal transformation as well as technological. “Society 5.0 is a human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems via a system that highly integrates cyber and physical space,” Ghosh says. “We are now in Society 4.0, the society of information where we share information and take information. The idea is that we should have comfortable, high quality lives that are full of vitality. The technology should work for human good. Germany has already started work on this. It has a project called Transport 5.0, where it is defining what it believes Transport 5.0 is: cross-domain, self-organising transport schemes and organisational principles for a user-centred transport system.”
In Transport 4.0 we currently use sensors that convert energy from changes in temperature, pressure, magnetism, etcetera into data; Transport 5.0 means that we “will be converting minds to data, people’s intentions, poses and movements” will create information. Actuators will control physical devices — automatic cars or traffic lights for example — where data is processed and converted to control command of the machines to control the movement or actions of those machines. “In case of social prescription, what will happen is that data will be converted to mind, so people will be acting towards greater social good, taking routes that reduce congestion, travelling at speeds for the benefit of the entire traffic stream,” Ghosh says.
Smart mobility test beds exist throughout the world, and Ghosh points to notable examples in Qingdao, Chelyabinsk, Western Australia and London. For Ireland, she concludes, this is the next step: “In Ireland at present, we have smart cities, smart districts and Smart Dublin. The pathway from going from a smart city to a smart mobility zone is a goal around which we need to develop a manual to make this jump. One of the first steps is looking into the infrastructural needs, the sensors, the communications and whatever else we need.
“We need to figure out how the infrastructure will communicate with the cars, and we need to think about international and European collaboration. There is so much going on and one of the easiest ways to participate is through European projects. We are looking into how we can bring cooperative, conceive and automated mobility into Ireland and move Ireland from Transport 4.0 to Transport 5.0. This is the future; it is coming very fast and there is no way to avoid it.”
