Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

AUTOMOT I V E , MOB I L I T Y & T RANS POR TAT I ON 115 Stenlake. “The idea being that if enough charging ports are put in place, there’s a reasonable chance one will be available. But experience shows that significant queues are still stacking up at times of high demand – and of course the most sustaina- ble solution is right-size infrastructure. “The answer can be found in prebooking charg- ing. By allowing drivers to plan their journey including charging, this solution would provide a predictable outcome that makes full use of available charging capacity and could help charg- ing providers and grid operators plan for the demand placed on their systems. You could even differentially price for areas of high demand and correspondingly use lower pricing to incentivise people to charge in periods of less high demand. An industry standard API to achieve this has been agreed, but it’s not currently being implemented.” The location data available from a connected car can also be usefully used in improving and enabling a range of services, such as routing, measurements of real-time traffic flow or real- time information on public transit. For example, Microsoft’s Azure Maps platform can accurately assess the weather by combining observational data obtained from sensors with global atmos- pheric weather models. This can allow an alert to be generated to warn of a weather hazard and suggest that a vehicle in a fleet be rerouted. A dispatcher can then reroute the fleet around environmental conditions, and the expected time of arrival is updated accordingly. “The set of services that Azure maps pro- vides is potentially very helpful for building most mobility solutions,” says Stenlake. “It has been developed in partnership with TomTom, Moovit and AccuWeather, and provides value not only in mapping but in the additional ser- vices it can enable.” According to Stenlake, Microsoft’s role will be in helping the industry work together to develop these new services, supported by the capabilities of its technologies. “We’re focusing on leveraging the power of our horizontal platform and on building intelligent approaches that can be adopted by an ecosystem of players,” says Stenlake. “These new services are complex and require many actors to be integrated together in a unified approach. That’s the ethos of everything that we’re trying to do in mobility.”