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Thames Valley Berkshire Live Labs – Executive Summary: Applying big data insights to improve services and the environment

As part of the ADEPT Smart Places Live Labs programme, Thames Valley Berkshire spent its £4.75m share of the funding to pilot a range of big data-led projects across five themes: Air Quality, Energy, Mobility and Health, Potholes, and Transport.

Trials were delivered across the 6 Berkshire Unitary Authorities, led by Reading Borough Council, and working with commercial and academic partners.

Air Quality – Improving air quality and reducing exposure to poor air quality

The air quality trial involved the installation and evaluation of 27 low-cost air quality sensors in three of the authorities and trials included:

• integration of the air quality sensors into the traffic management system to improve air quality
• generating insights from the integration of air quality data with other data including mobile phone, pothole and health data
• trialling area wide air quality modelling at 10m resolution; and exploring how modelled data could be used in an app to influence travel behaviour
• understanding people’s exposure to poor air quality.

The project provided valuable insight into the challenges and benefits of applying big data.

Energy – EV charging and building energy demand management

The energy workstream consisted of two main interrelated outputs:

• the trial of a smart energy operations platform tackling the need to think more holistically around EV charging, integrating it effectively with building energy, local energy generation such as rooftop solar, and the carbon intensity of energy in the national grid
• a Berkshire-wide public study of EV charging infrastructure, projected demand and the quantification of the need and type of EV infrastructure.

Mobility and Health – The application of big data to developing transport and health insights

The objectives of the public health insights study focused on transport and childhood obesity, adult obesity and respiratory illness. The project drew together a range of datasets including child obesity data, mobile phone data, network management data, public transport accessibility data, socio-economic and demographic data, and environmental datasets to provide spatial insights across Berkshire.  

Potholes

The aim of the trial was to deliver an automated approach to identification of the severity and impact of potholes across the six Berkshire authorities. The solution developed and trialled was an AI-based visual imaging approach to identification and categorisation of potholes with cameras mounted on refuse vehicles.

Transport

The transport work package brought together a range of innovation trials around data collection including IoT based traffic counters, data sharing between project partners with new open data interfaces, and the trial of network prediction systems and the application of mobile phone data as an alternative to ANPR for journey time monitoring.