New Delhi: Bengaluru’s incessant traffic and urban mobility challenges may have some new solutions.
E-commerce platform Flipkart has selected three companies as winners of Gridlock Hackathon 2.0, an open challenge aimed at crowdsourcing artificial intelligence and machine-learning solutions to the city’s traffic problems.
Gridlock Oracle, PRAHAR, and ParkSight developed prototypes to address distinct aspects of Bengaluru’s traffic and mobility ecosystem.
In collaboration with the Bengaluru Traffic Police, MapmyIndia, Arcadis and HackerEarth, Flipkart organised Gridlock Hackathon 2.0, where participants were encouraged to build solutions using data from the Bengaluru Traffic Police’s ASTraM (Actionable Intelligence for Sustainable Traffic Management) platform, designed and implemented by Arcadis.
More than 33,000 participants from across the country developed more than 1,100 prototypes. The winning teams developed solutions focused on predicting congestion, improving traffic resource deployment and addressing parking-related congestion in the city.
AI solutions for Bengaluru’s traffic problem
Gridlock Oracle, which took first place, developed a solution that predicts how a single traffic incident can result in citywide congestion using a Hawkes Process model. With the help of a live control-room dashboard, the traffic police could deploy resources proactively before gridlock spreads.
PRAHAR (Predictive Resource Allocation for High-Impact Area Response) took second place for building a traffic intelligence platform. It provides suggestions on the optimal deployment of officers, barricades, diversions, routes and dispatch stations.
ParkSight — Parking-Induced Congestion Intelligence — took third place. It analysed parking violation records to identify priority congestion and enforcement zones, incorporating hotspot detection, forecasting, patrol optimisation and validation against ASTraM congestion data.
The competition had two stages. In the first round, participants faced an online machine-learning challenge. In the second round, they had to tackle real-world urban mobility problems. Teams developed solutions across themes including congestion prediction, traffic violation detection, movement pattern analysis, parking intelligence and smarter mobility decision-making.
The winners were announced at an event at Flipkart Bengaluru’s headquarters.
“The response to this hackathon, with thousands of participants coming forward with ideas and solutions, shows the value of opening real-world problems to a much wider community of innovators. We are pleased to partner with Bengaluru Traffic Police on an initiative that can help explore new approaches to making the city’s traffic management more effective,” said Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Flipkart Group.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)