Artificial Intelligence: Can smarter transit prevent Sofia from car overkill?

The Municipality of Bulgaria’s capital Sofia is now taking action to reverse the trend towards even more cars in the city: A fleet of electric mini buses shall be purchased that will not only drive emission-free, but also offer on demand, shared mobility services.

This will take quite an effort in route planning and network management, though. Artificial intelligence (AI) may help. It can develop a model for the fleet management that learns typical patterns in usage data and then responds properly when it detects these patterns in the requests.

Using AI in public services implies new challenges: The AI needs data of superior quality and volume, and this may raise public concerns about data privacy. Therefore, Sofia will anticipate citizens’ concerns of the AI usage for the management of the on-demand mini buses.