Service planning and mission control: urban.MASS collaborates with Fleetonomy.ai on management systems for floc® Duo Rail™

2024/02/20

London, 20^th February 2024 – urban.MASS today announced a new collaboration with Fleetonomy.ai, a Finland-based application developer for autonomous vehicle fleet operations and mission control systems. The two companies signed an agreement that will combine their industry leading expertise in autonomous zero-emission transport innovation – together, they will develop a concept design for the mission control and remote supervision of urban.MASS’s floc® Duo Rail™ passenger and freight transport system.

The urban.MASS and Fleetonomy.ai teams will focus on the development of a concept design for mission control, remote supervision and connected multi-vehicle control systems. The outcome will be integrated into the simulation and live operation of a floc® scheme. This will significantly advance the capacity for planning of floc® services – it will allow floc® operators to efficiently plan services in the short-term to accommodate variations in demand, whether predicted or not. For long-term planning, Fleetonomy.ai’s mission management application, applied to calibrated models of a floc® scheme, will enable the impact of variations in the number of pods, stations, or the configuration or length of a track to be easily assessed.

The autonomous floc® Duo Rail™ transit system will enable transport operators to deliver high quality urban passenger and cargo services at a lower cost, and with a lower carbon footprint than comparable guided solutions. The system’s ability to operate in some of the world’s densest urban settings, as a critical component within an integrated transport scheme, depends on a robust understanding of operational challenges. The system must also demonstrate compliance with the toughest regulatory regimes and safety standards. This is where the collaboration between urban.MASS and Fleetonomy.ai offers maximum value; the joint teams will employ a phased development process using Fleetonomy.ai’s tools and simulation environments to validate a variety of floc® pod configurations and operational scenarios to optimise the pod design and overall performance of multi-pod services.

In future, the scope of this work will also include the mission management of dynamic floc® platoons to realise the scheduled high-capacity operations of many pods, as well as the on-demand operations of platoons of fewer pods. Such flexibility improves connectivity with other modes such as mass transit and surface-based shared shuttles, where alignment of capacity to improve intermodal transfers is critical to ensuring the highest quality customer experience.

“The urban.MASS team is delighted to be partnering with Fleetonomy.ai. Integrating innovative approaches to service planning and operations is a critical step in realising our zero-emission floc® Duo Rail™ mass transit system. Fleetonomy.ai’s expertise in mission management, vehicle situational awareness and fleet management is unrivalled and we are looking forward to working together to demonstrate the advantages of this exciting new transport solution.”

- Co-founder, Ricky Sandhu

“Fleetonomy.ai has been working on the design, development and implementation of mission management solutions for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems since 2015. 

Our involvement with the urban.MASS team developing floc® Duo Rail™ is very exciting and provides the opportunity to develop fleet management solutions for a groundbreaking technology.  We very much look forward to the next stage.”

- Managing Director, Markus Kantonen

Notes to Editors:

• About urban.MASS: A UK-based mobility business focused on the design and delivery of innovative, zero-emission mass transit solutions. urban.MASS was founded to create affordable, accessible and connected mass transit for all, and to reduce congestion and pollution from passenger and cargo transport. Products include the floc® Duo Rail® system, a flexible transit system that can match capacity with demand via high frequency ‘platoons’ of passenger and/or cargo logistics pods. Its narrow and flexible footprint minimises the need for earthworks, costly tunnels and large stations. https://urbanmass.co.uk/about-us.php

Contact:

Jeff Ashe

jeff.ashe@urbanmass.co.uk

+44 7825 860 248

• About Fleetonomy.ai: a privately-owned software company with deep roots in game technology, real-time physics modelling, 3D graphics engine development and AI and situational awareness components. fleetonomy.ai

Contact:
Markus Kantonen
markus.kantonen@fleetonomy.ai
+358 45 221 9665