USA: Under a five-year programme, Cubic Transportation Systems and the University of California at San Diego are to launch a ‘collaborative partnership’ to study next-generation transport technology in cities, with a strong focus on contactless payments and passenger information systems. Cubic has underwritten the partnership with a $500000 grant to UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering to fund research by the faculty’s academics, students and Cubic’s own staff. Designed to explore the application of ‘emerging technologies’, the programme will study the use of consumer mobile devices, wireless communications and account-based payment processing systems. The data generated by these services could then be harnessed to provide more personalised transport information for individual passengers. ‘Our research will make better use of existing data and seek innovative ways to apply this information to improve the utilisation of a city’s transport network’, says Pradip Mistry, Cubic’s Vice-President of Engineering. Cubic hopes to exploit UCSD’s long-standing strength in researching wireless networks, location-based services, data warehousing, and system architecture and analytics.l More...
