Aarhus Advances Sustainable Mobility with BIPED Traffic Dashboard
As European cities work toward becoming climate-neutral, advanced data tools are playing a central role in shaping the future of urban mobility. In Aarhus, Denmark, the BIPED project – Building Positive Energy Districts – is empowering the city to plan smarter and reduce emissions through a cutting-edge traffic dashboard built on high-resolution mobility data.
BIPED (Building Positive Energy Districts) is an EU-funded project under the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme (Grant ID: 101139060). Its goal is to help cities create energy-positive urban districts—areas that generate more energy than they consume—by combining advanced modelling, data analytics, and participatory planning.
A key enabler in this effort is the transport sector, where reducing emissions and optimising flows can have a profound impact on the energy balance of a district.
GLayer: The Engine Behind Real-Time Traffic Insight
At the heart of BIPED’s data platform is GLayer, a GPU-accelerated tool for processing and visualising massive spatial datasets. GLayer enables real-time queries and produces rich visual dashboards and heatmaps for decision-makers. Even with tens of millions of records, responses are delivered in under 100 milliseconds.
GLayer is designed to be intuitive and modular. It connects easily to existing databases, supports REST API integrations, and allows city stakeholders to explore traffic and energy data without writing code.
Aarhus Traffic Dashboard
As part of the BIPED initiative, the team developed a detailed traffic dashboard for the city of Aarhus. The dashboard provides information such as average speeds, average travel times, and sample sizes for selected road segments and times.
These insights are based on TomTom Traffic Stats and cover four selected weeks in 2023, each representing a season:
15–21 January (Winter)
15–21 April (Spring)
15–21 July (Summer)
30 October – 6 November (Autumn)
These periods were chosen to be representative and free of public holidays, offering a consistent year-round snapshot of traffic conditions.
The dashboard feeds into a macroscopic traffic model used by Aarhus to explore how different planning measures can reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency at the district level. The model incorporates:
A manually enhanced traffic network from OpenStreetMap
An origin-destination matrix derived from big mobility data
Spatio-temporal analysis across multiple urban zones
Together, these tools allow the city to test “what-if” scenarios that support the creation of positive energy districts—urban areas that are self-sufficient and climate-resilient.