After decades of rapid infrastructure expansion, China is placing greater emphasis on making its vast transport network safer, more efficient and more intelligent through the application of digital technologies.

These developments, including those in the research stage and those already rolled out in the real world, are causing major operational shifts in how things are moved via land, sea and air.

From highways and ports to waterways and deep-sea equipment, researchers are working to solve how to better manage large-scale traffic flows, how to identify risks earlier, how to support safer navigation in complex waters, and how to make critical equipment more reliable and self-dependent.

Roads reading traffic

At the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Transportation Systems in Beijing's Tongzhou district, researchers are exploring how roads can be made safer, more efficient and less congested.

By using sensing networks and cloud platforms, the researchers are able to enable roads themselves to become an active, responsive participant in the transport network. Via these sensors, roads can provide instant updates to connected vehicles and drivers informing them of accidents, traffic, weather conditions and detours.

"Road to vehicle coordination is not simply about connecting vehicles and roads," said Wang Lin, deputy director of the laboratory and director of the intelligent transport research center at the Ministry of Transport's highways research institute. "It is about changing the way people travel."

Wang said the goal is to make "vehicles understand roads, and roads remind vehicles", so that common bottlenecks in road transport can be mitigated and even avoided altogether.

"In the past, roads were mainly 'read' by people," Wang said. "Now, we are using machines and automated systems to read roads, so that vehicles, roads and cloud platforms can work together."

Another major factor in connecting roads and vehicles together is the reduction of risks caused by human error.

"Human factors are involved in about 95 percent of all traffic accidents," Wang said.

He gave the example of vehicle platooning — "The distance between vehicles may be reduced from the current level of around 200 meters to 20 meters or even 10 meters, which could greatly increase the capacity of a single lane," he said.