Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited the Institute of Sustainable Mobility and Transport Networks (IMET) of the National Centre for Research and Technological Development (NCRT) and was informed about the operation of the systems, which with information from Google, the use of Artificial Intelligence and the adjustment of traffic lights managed to predict with 93% accuracy the traffic on the roads two hours before and to reduce traffic on the roads by 10-15%.
Each day 15,000 people (600.000 a year) are informed of this information free of charge with an application on their mobile phones, said research director Evangelos Mitsakis, and thus citizens can choose the fastest and safest route.
Imet officials said they are ready to apply these systems to traffic in Athens and this is the next goal of the government, the Prime Minister stressed, adding that “Research with a high degree of innovation in Greece has very practical results in improving the daily life of citizens in Thessaloniki.”
“What we see here is a very interesting partnership between the public and private sectors. By taking open data from Google, but also using other data sources, we can now synthesize an extremely good picture of traffic in real time, make predictions about how traffic will be in the future and intervene in the operation of traffic lights, so as to facilitate the flow of traffic and of course identify points that are accident-prone, thus reducing traffic accidents and improving road safety,” Mitsotakis said and continued: “The work you have done is very important. Immediately afterwards, the next objective is to bring this system to Athens. We will also secure the necessary funding because we want the innovative research that is being done in our country to have practical applications.”
“What is being done here is the guide not only for the country. We are at the global forefront of how we can use data and how AI ultimately translates into a better reality for citizens.
We have endowed Thessaloniki with very important infrastructure projects. However, we do not have the same capacity everywhere to make such important interventions. So even a gain of 10% to 15% reduction in traffic in Attica can make a very big and quick difference,” the Prime Minister noted, while declaring the government’s support for the development of new applications at IMET.
It is noted that IMET is one of the five institutes of EKETA that has been operating for 25 years and employs 160 people.
For her part, Google spokeswoman Victoria Kalfaki expressed her satisfaction with the use of Google’s data.
Then Deputy Minister of Development and Investment Stavros Kalafatis said: “IMET’s contribution to sustainable mobility issues and the actions it takes to decongest the traffic problem in Thessaloniki is very important. It is very important for everyone to see first-hand how research centres provide concrete, safe, sustainable solutions to problems that citizens face in their daily lives.
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IMET does this with modern systems, with algorithms. With the help of artificial intelligence, it provides solutions for the city’s traffic and is a guide for other parts of the country.”
“It is a very important lab in which we monitor all the traffic in the city, optimize it through the traffic lights through dynamic information with our own algorithms that two hours in advance can tell you what the traffic will be with very high accuracy. This knowledge that we have should be passed on and transferred to other parts of the country. IMET is a pioneer for our city of Thessaloniki and we are very proud of EKETA,” said EKETA President Evangelos Bekiaris, while IMET Director Vassilis Kappatos stressed: “We showed the Prime Minister the role that IMET plays in the development of sustainable mobility and modern transport. Our results do not stay in the laboratories, they are translated into society, we are next to the citizen, we have less congestion, better transport and of course safer.”
M Mitsotakis was welcomed by the officials of EKETA and IMET at the entrance of the Institute, with a demonstration by the robot dog KYON.
Meanwhile, MP Stratos Simopoulos, who is chairman of the Parliament’s Research and Technology Committee, informed the Prime Minister that Parliament has taken over the EPTA (European Technological Assessment) trans-European committee on “Green Cities and Sustainable Mobility” and meetings will be held in Thessaloniki in April and in Athens in September.
Present at today’s event were also Deputy Ministers Kostas Gioulekas and Anna Efthymiou as well as MPs Dimitris Kouvelas, Diamantis Golidakis and Theodoros Karaoglou.
