TomTom has set up a not-for-profit International Traffic Foundation, which will bring together stakeholders from academia, industry and policy making to help reduce traffic congestion.
The foundation will nurture talent in the area of traffic management, publish research papers and host traffic-related events.
It will fund two PhDs and two post-doctorate research projects annually in traffic management and knowledge technology. The research topics for 2012 include engineering models for traffic management, vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-server communications and the physics of transport and traffic.
TomTom will also fund research for creating standards in the field of road transport at a European level. This relates to the EU Directive 2010/40/EU on the framework for deploying Intelligent Transport Systems for road transport.
TomTom previously announced 20 ways it would contribute to reducing traffic congestion with its own products, including increasing the reach of TomTom HD Traffic to 22 countries and improving the service’s accuracy.