Fetch.ai and Datarella launch a trial of blockchain-based smart city parking management in Germany

Cambridge-based artificial intelligence lab Fetch.ai and industrial distributed ledger blockchain solutions company Datarella GmbH today announced the launch of their smart city trial for parking in Munich, Germany.

The smart city trial will be launched at Connex Buildings and will use multi-agent blockchain-based artificial intelligence services to provide smart mobility solutions in its commercial real estate properties in the city center.

“Fetch.ai provides a decentralized framework for creating and customizing autonomous AI agents to perform complex coordination tasks,” said Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai. “Our vision is to connect digital and real-life economies in order to enable automation on a decentralized network and change the way we use data.”

This means that parking providers – the owners of the infrastructure – can negotiate prices and access to that infrastructure to customers who need parking through a decentralized network in an efficient way.

Fetch.ai has created a network of intelligent agents using its artificial intelligence system with what it calls autonomous economic agents or AEAs. These agents support the sustainable and efficient use of city infrastructure in Munich through an application where the available space will independently negotiate the “price” of parking spaces based on availability and demand. A major side effect is that this would reduce traffic and traffic jams when people attempt to access overcrowded parking lots where spaces are not available.

Users can earn rewards in a digital currency if they choose a space that is less popular or in demand, or if they don’t use parking at all on certain days. In this way, the parking EEA determines reward levels based on maximizing resource utilization.

“The owners, as well as the city council, are interested in optimizing parking management to allow parking available for all employees of company tenants while organizing the flow of traffic and preventing commuter traffic jams,” said Michael Reuter. CEO of Datarella.

With this vision, Reuter explained, users would have an incentive to reduce individual traffic to Connex offices through the reward system measured through the use of parking lots. The number of tokens rewarded per wallet and per minute to a given user will depend on a given car park and EEA determination.

“Our system encourages community use of public transport through a token distribution system, reducing congestion which is responsible for much of Munich’s CO2 emissions,” said Reuter.

Through this system, Fetch.ai and Datarella hope to help Munich reduce total pollution in the city and thus achieve emissions targets for 2021 and beyond.

“Assuming there is a 10% reduction in car use in Munich alone, the city would see a reduction in CO2 emissions of 34,000 tons per year,” Sheikh said. “Increased to cover all of Germany, this equates to 1.7 million tonnes of CO2 reduction every year. This smart city solution has the potential to penetrate huge markets by simply tapping into wasted data and using it efficiently. “

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