HCLTech, a leading global technology company, and Transport for NSW (TfNSW)’s Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (SCATS) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to explore advancing AI-powered analytics capabilities for SCATS.
The collaboration aims to make traffic, congestion and geospatial data more accessible to traffic operators, planners and engineers through artificial intelligence and multilingual capabilities.
The existing SCATS tool enables users to interact with traffic, congestion and geospatial data through natural language queries and compare insights across selected time periods.
Bringing multilingual AI to traffic management
Developed by the NSW Government in 1975, SCATS is now deployed in more than 200 cities across over 30 countries, making it one of the widely used adaptive traffic management systems globally.
Under the proposed collaboration, HCLTech will explore integrating Sarvam’s multilingual foundation models with SCATS. This could enable traffic operators, planners and engineers in India to query and analyse SCATS data in local Indian languages.
The initiative is aimed at making sophisticated traffic intelligence more accessible to users while supporting more efficient management of increasingly complex urban transport networks.
Focus on data sovereignty
The collaboration will also explore approaches to address local data sovereignty requirements for smart city infrastructure.
This includes the possibility of enabling cities to operate SCATS AI infrastructure on premises using private cloud environments, providing greater control over data and AI infrastructure while supporting local regulatory and operational requirements.
Transport for NSW, Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, said SCATS demonstrates the global impact of innovation from New South Wales.
“SCATS is a great example of New South Wales innovation with an international impact. This collaboration with HCLTech will explore how AI can make sophisticated traffic information more accessible to the people managing growing cities in India. It is also another example of the strong technology and economic links between New South Wales and India,” Minns said.
HCLTech, President, Growth Markets, Swapan Johri, said the rapid expansion of cities is creating opportunities to rethink how technology can be used to manage increasingly complex transport networks.
“The world’s major cities are expanding at an unprecedented pace, creating new opportunities to reimagine how technology can manage increasingly complex transport networks. By bringing together SCATS’ proven traffic management capabilities with HCLTech’s AI and engineering expertise, we want to put powerful traffic insights directly into the hands of operators,” Johri said.
He added that the collaboration could combine Australian innovation with Indian technology and talent to support the development of smarter and more responsive cities.
AI for smarter urban mobility
The proposed integration of multilingual AI capabilities with SCATS could help Indian cities derive greater value from traffic and mobility data, while enabling users to interact with the system in familiar local languages.
The initiative also highlights the potential of combining established traffic management technologies with AI, private cloud infrastructure and multilingual foundation models to address the evolving requirements of smart cities.