In this interview video, Bridgestone Mobility Solutions (BMS) Vice President Raghunath Banerjee and our Managing Director George Cambanis discuss vehicle data usage and the BMS Data Listings in the Mobito Data Marketplace
Transcript:
George
"Hi, this is George Cambanis from Mobito and we're here for another data provider showcase.
Today, we have the great pleasure to be with Raghunath from Bridgestone Mobility Solutions. BMS is one of the very strong data partners in the Mobito Data Marketplace. We're very keen to discuss today with Raghunath about some of the use-cases and the benefits that people and industries are getting from utilizing BMS data.
So Raghunath, if you want to give a quick intro to the business, that would be great for the audience.
Raghunath
Thank you George for inviting me. It's my pleasure to be part of this session and to share the vision that we have within Bridgestone Mobility Solutions.
As the world is moving towards connected, autonomous, shared and electric mobility, we believe that data is the main part of the puzzle: the new oil and the engine behind all these developments.
So we are looking to create an integrated data ecosystem for fleets, mobility providers and future smart cities using AI and machine learning algorithms. Within Bridgestone Mobility Solutions, we have 1.2 million connected assets globally and we have 50,000+ active commercial fleet customers from different segments: transport and logistics, construction, waste management, rental, leasing and so on.
George
That's very interesting. I think the story that you so well offered is a good example of the transformation that we're seeing in the industry. This perfectly shows how different stakeholders need to adapt to this more connected mobility ecosystem: produce and capture the value of vehicle data. This was very helpful in understanding how your data is initially produced by your large fleet and the different industries that this fleet is in.
What would also be very interesting to discuss Raghunath is how are different companies and industries benefiting from the data solutions that you make available?
Raghunath
It's a very exciting journey for us. As I mentioned we have 50,000+ fleet customers to whom we are already providing advanced data analytics services.
Beyond the fleet customers, we are right now focusing towards the B2B segment where we are selling our vehicle data intelligence and our predictive Road Surface Index value proposition. We speak with highway constructors, road maintenance agencies, roadside assistance providers and many more.
It's a very interesting part of how the smart connected vehicles and the connected tires can bring a lot of additional insights to them.
Secondly, many of the leading B2B mobility service providers are today using our connected vehicle data insights to improve their products towards smart mobility. We are also actively engaged with municipalities and smart cities across Europe to help them improve their road safety services in the data driven decision making process. Finally, we are also working with several digital twin platforms and marketplaces to share our insights towards the larger ecosystem.
George
That's great Raghunath, it's really good to see those more advanced use-cases and really nice to see how vehicle data is used towards road safety, road maintenance and smart decision making. Given this data availability, it would be great for you to tell us what type of data services and different data sets are available in the Mobito Data Marketplace for consumption and for evaluation by different mobility stakeholders.
Raghunath
At present, our global anonymized floating car dataset, for example, latitude, longitude, heading speed, timestamp, vehicle type is already available via Mobito Data Marketplace.
We are gathering this data at a very granular level so that the mobility provider and the consumer through your marketplace can make a lot of sense out of it. Secondly, as part of our advanced vehicle data insights like acceleration, wheel speed, harsh braking, cornering, fuel consumption data, CO2 emission details, battery state of the charge, ambient temperature, fog lights, wiper status and so on - that we are extracting from the connected vehicles in an anonymized way.
We are also ready to share this with our future consumers to use it for their own usage. Some of our insights are already available in the marketplace, the rest of it will be made available in the coming weeks.
Last but not least, we are also working on several advanced road condition insights such as pothole detection and road roughness index; these will be also released as well in the coming months for your consumers.
George
It has been fascinating working with you: starting with probe data and then adding all of these extra layers of derivative data products which are catering to those specific use-cases.
Given the fact that the industry is slowly maturing and we're seeing more and more different vehicle data being made available, it would be nice to point out some of the unique selling proposition and the benefits of the BMS fleet data.
Raghunath
What I would like to first start with is our global footprint. Within Bridgestone Mobility Solutions - Webfleet is a global telematics brand. We are market leaders in Europe.
Beyond Europe, we are also growing fast in Mexico, Chile, South America and many other new areas. We are also present in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Additionally, in our install base we have passenger cars, LCV's, HCV's and Buses. As a result, we have access to the data from all OEM brands and from multiple segments.
We are capable of extracting different sensor data which can then be used on top of the probe data to further enrich the value propositions. Also, based on the connected tire data, the algorithms developed by us can predict the tire pressure, wear, damage and the complete ecosystem.
To summarize, our global presence, multi brand exposure and vehicle/ tire data intelligence makes us unique in the data solution space.
George
Yes, that's very interesting to hear and even there Raghunath, one of the benefits we've seen utilizing your data is the fact that you have the flexibility to generate new datasets upon request by being in control of how the data is captured. The second thing that I think adds a lot to your global coverage is that the fleets that you're connected to tend to be driving a lot: they cover a lot of different kilometers and road segments.
Raghunath
So we are having a huge presence and we are now able to share the heat maps from our vehicles. They represent our commercial fleets driving Monday to Friday every week throughout the year. This is very important for roadside assistance providers and road authorities to collect fresh data from us..
George
Yes, that's great and hopefully many of the companies and data science teams that are working on these interesting challenges of mobility will be interested to get hold of your data samples for their evaluation. With that in mind, can you briefly mention how companies can access your data from the Mobito Data Marketplace?
Raghunath
Our data insights can be shared via a flexible API structure. We can slice and dice the data insights as per our customer requirements. We can offer any set of data at a given point of time: either on-demand basis or via continuous data stream. So we are able to comply with every possible request.
We also have complete control over the GDPR compliance and a simple commercial framework to enable faster turnaround time for any request from the marketplace.
George
Yes, that's indeed very useful as the first request we usually get and the first question we get from customers is if GDPR compliance is met with different datasets. Seeing how Bridgestone Mobility Solutions is treating those data sets and making them GDPR compliant is a big check in this data evaluation process."