Transportation agencies today have more data than ever before. Traffic signals, sensors, connected vehicles, and analytics platforms continuously produce petabytes of information about what is happening across the entire transportation system. Visibility has improved, but it has now created a new problem - users now have more data than they can possibly review, analyze, and ultimately act upon.

Today's challenge is no longer about getting data, it's about turning that data into action. To solve this, Flow Labs is introducing our latest major feature upgrade, Insights, which will be rolled out to all of our customers in the coming weeks.

What is Insights?

Insights allows users to intelligently monitor and analyze their entire transportation system instantly and automatically.

When it comes to critical infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and black box algorithms aren't enough. Insights is where Engineering Intelligence meets Artificial Intelligence, allowing users to create and customize their own algorithms, which then crunch through all of the data in the Flow Platform generating critical insights.

These insights can be used to generate alerts, screen the transportation system for major issues, support faster diagnosis, and help guide recommended actions. Instead of engineers manually reviewing performance or responding to generic notifications, they can rely on Insights to consistently identify conditions that meet their definition of an issue.

Designed for Engineering Workflows

Insights includes a set of out-of-the-box Insights based on algorithms designed by engineers, for engineers. These provide simple and accessible starting points for identifying common operational issues, while allowing users to configure them and customize them to match local conditions and priorities.

With Insights we’re throwing the black-box into the dumpster - this feature is designed to be transparent and fully auditable. Users can see how each algorithm is constructed and understand how the underlying logic works. This transparency is critical for maintaining consistency and trust when managing complex, safety-critical infrastructure.

Applying Sound Engineering Judgment at Machine Speed

Every engineer has an established process for evaluating issues, shaped by industry best practices, experience and local knowledge. Insights allows users to encode that process directly into algorithms by defining rules and logic that reflect how they assess performance.

Once configured, those rules can then be applied automatically, continuously, and instantly across the entire transportation system. The same evaluation process that an individual engineer does at one signal can now be consistently repeated at scale, at lightning speed. Insights puts engineers in the driving seat.

Embedded Across the Platform

Insights is embedded throughout the Flow Platform to support different use cases.

It can be used to generate alerts that appear as notifications in the platform, with clear, text-based summaries supported by data. Any Insight can also be used to screen the network, helping teams quickly identify where the most significant issues are located.

Insights also includes built-in email functionality. Users can create multiple mailing lists, generate different insight emails for different audiences, and control the timing and frequency of delivery. This allows information to be shared intentionally with the right people receiving the right information.

Turning Better Data into Better Engineering Decisions

Insights is designed to help teams move more efficiently from data to decision. By reducing unnecessary data and overwhelming alerts, by applying consistent engineering judgment, and by surfacing more meaningful issues, Insights helps engineers focus on diagnosing problems and taking action rather than sifting through data.

Insights will begin rolling out to users over the coming weeks and we're truly excited to help engineers across the country take faster action and make their transportation systems cleaner, clearer, and safer for everyone.

To find out more about Insights and how your team can use it, get in touch with our sales team.