A review of the public sector ITS projects in the past decade in India shows that very few projects were successfully implemented. With Government of India’s 100 smart cities initiative, it is imperative for consultants, system integrator and decision makers to understand the challenges and learnings from these earlier ITS projects to create successful smart cities. This talk draws upon past experience on ITS and Smart City projects to provide recommendations on technical, operational and human factors associated with Indian ITS projects to make technology projects successful.

Transportation systems, buses, trucks, trains and ships can transport either passenger or goods or both. While passenger transport receives much attention, the goods transporters create economic benefits. The goods transport systems are called logistics networks, which are both local and global. Inter country as well as intercity goods transports are very important for the country’s economy. The logistics industry is asset intensive and needs vehicles, containers, warehouses, employees, IT infrastructure, connections with Governments, shippers and consumers, etc. The logistics services are provided by the private sector and the logistics infrastructure such as roads, ports, airports etc are provided by the Governments. The performance of the logistics sector depends on both hard and soft infrastructure, skilled manpower, Government policies, cluster locations and connectivity, service providers, insurance agents, research in new technologies, and host of other things in addition those connected with actual goods transport and delivery.

Recent digitalization of Logistics industry called Logistics 4.0 makes use of “smart” containers, vehicles, pallets, and transport systems in order to create a fully networked supply stream that offers supply chain managers, shippers, freight forwarders, and others the necessary visibility to route transport and perform other logistics tasks in an optimal way. The Logistics 4.0 technological solutions are based on using drones, self-steering vehicles, sensors, Big Data, GPS, RFID, M2M. As part of the concept, the technologies dedicated to modern enterprises use i.e. virtual reality glasses, intelligent transporters, gates, forklifts and automatic vehicles. New Technologies are changing the industry structure and forcing re-examination of the business development strategies. Indeed, wealth and employment creation are moving from asset builders to service providers to start-ups.

In this lecture, after a brief introduction to the new technologies, we develop an ecosystem framework for logistics service sector that includes all the above stake holders and new technologies and develops methods for analyzing performance and mitigating risk. We present ecosystem examples inbound logistics, e-retail sectors and analyze their importance in the Indian context. The ecosystem is used for developing supply chain innovations and also mechanisms for supply chain Governance using the concept of logistics mall. We also talk about the startup scenario in the Logistics 4.0 area.

Networking is one of the key technologies that is enabling the current change in transportation systems. Taxi aggregation and ride sharing services are prime examples of this phenomenon. Networking together with ever improving technologies related to computation and autonomy, provides us with the opportunity to radically transform our transportation systems. In particular, with these technologies, we could achieve far greater coordination and hence efficiency. In this talk, I will present our work on two problems that seek to achieve such coordination. The first problem is on real-time coordination of autonomous and networked vehicles for intersection usage. The second problem is on coordinated first and last mode services in a multi-modal transportation system.

Bio: Pavan Tallapragada obtained his PhD at the University of Maryland in 2013. During 2014 to 2017 he was a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego. Since 2017, he is an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. His research interests include networked control systems, distributed systems and control, cyber physical systems and networked transportation systems.