AWS Public Sector Blog

Citi Logik helps governments drive action on transportation insights with AWS

Citi Logik is a UK-based government technology (GovTech) company and AWS Partner with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Citi Logik uses AWS to enhance anonymised raw mobile network data (MND) so organisations can identify trends in the flow of people across a variety of different transportation modes—like on foot, in a vehicle or by train. Citi Logik provides their customers, including the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Wiltshire County Council, with valuable insights to help them make informed decisions about future transportation planning and urban planning development.

Citi Logik uses AWS to develop transportation insights and predictive analytics derived from MND in compliance with data privacy laws. They analyse over 150 million journeys in the UK every single day using MND. Historically, MND projects cost tens of thousands of pounds and took many weeks to complete. This put those analyses, insights, and potential societal benefits out of reach of most customers.

To combat these challenges, Citi Logik uses AWS to reduce the cost and increase the speed at which their MND data analysis algorithms run. This makes MND insights more accessible to government bodies. To provide a high performance, scalable and cost-efficient solution that makes MND data and insights simple to navigate, Citi Logik created the self-service People Movement Portal. The People Movement Portal is a serverless service developed on AWS that helps organisations, like West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Wiltshire County Council, gain access to insights based on MND. This data helps organizations forecast demand for rail services with real-time updates on train and station capacity and flow; understand where to install Electrical Vehicle (EV) chargepoints based on where and when people charge their cars; make data-driven decisions for event planning around timings, road closures, diversions and staffing levels; and more.

Citi Logik developed the front end of the People Movement Portal as a fully serverless solution. People Movement Portal is hosted in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and served using Amazon CloudFront to provide low latency content delivery. API data is provided using Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda, with data stored in Amazon Aurora, allowing the portal user interface to quickly display data in various ways, while supporting varying levels of demand.

Citi Logik performs data processing using Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena with various processing stages linked together using AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). By building data processing pipelines using AWS serverless big data services, Citi Logik can return requests for data in hours instead of weeks, and scale to handle various levels of demand, only paying for the processing power used.

Citi Logik used AWS developer tools, including AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodePipeline, to implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This helped them to securely and efficiently collaborate on code, with contributions encrypted in transit and at rest. Additionally, Citi Logik use AWS CloudFormation via AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to deliver infrastructure updates and test new features in a multi-environment setup.

Now, with the People Movement Portal, a range of institutions and local authorities can access the rich data offered by MND at a price that fits into limited budgets. This includes a range of people movement analytics which can help governments understand a person’s origins and destinations, dwell time, journey purpose, mode of transport, demographics, and more. The use cases available continue to grow from new data, from footfall counts to EV chargepoint analysis. To date, Citi Logik has produced over 300 automated datasets for the portal for customers such as West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Wiltshire County Council to assist them in making transportation and urban planning decisions. These datasets can now be produced in under 48 hours—a process that used to take several weeks of manual work.

“AWS’s serverless services allow us to build complex data processing pipelines, integrated within one cloud provider. We can scale to meet spikes in demand, while only paying for the processing power we actually use. In addition, by making use of AWS development tools, we are able to automatically build, test and deploy code, processing modules, and cloud infrastructure, again all within one place,” said Andrew Gordon, head of development at Citi Logik.

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