Day Two - Global Mobility Forum - AT (Arabian Time, GMT+03:00)
The complete decarbonisation of transport requires a fundamental pivot toward an ecosystem powered by battery electrification, green hydrogen, and low-carbon alternative fuels. This, however, requires focusing on the massive physical infrastructure necessary to fuel a multi-modal fleet. What is needed to design integrated, multi-modal fueling infrastructure that support heavy rail, commercial aviation, and long-haul trucking concurrently? What immediate structural upgrades and substations are required to support the simultaneous charging demands of hundreds of heavy-duty and regular vehicles? How can we make the shift energy efficient?
Achieving true electric vehicle (EV) adoption at scale will require solving challenges of power distribution, grid integration, road and grid modernisation, and heavy commercial fleet electrification. The rapid deployment of passenger vehicles and multi-ton logistics fleets is placing unprecedented stress on legacy urban distribution grids, exposing critical gaps in substation capacity and high-power availability. This session moves past the targets to the delivery constraints: grid connection lead times, distribution capacity at charging sites, utilisation economics that determine whether operators survive, siting rights in parking assets, and the commercial fleets that will decide adoption.
The execution of the National Transport and Logistics Strategy and its target to reduce road accident fatalities to historic lows has placed Saudi Arabia at the forefront of intelligent traffic automation. Managing the unique high-speed corridors linking mega-projects like NEOM, the Red Sea, and Riyadh requires moving past legacy speed-camera networks to fully integrated, AI-driven safety layers; transforming the Kingdom's highways into cognitive enforcement networks. This keynote examines enforcement as a safety system rather than a camera network, and the behaviour change that follows.
This technical case study examines the engineering, cloud architecture, and data integration required to build the centralised "urban brain" of a next-generation smart city. The session maps out how developers ingest data from millions of IoT sensors, building systems, and transit grids into a singular, unified platform powered by geospatial digital twins and predictive AI. By analyzing real-world deployment blueprints, this case study reveals how to bridge the operational gap between separate public agencies, automate city-wide incident response, and maintain a self-healing urban ecosystem at scale.
As transport networks transition into hyper-connected ecosystems, threats to digital and critical infrastructure rise alongside. Integrated ecosystems will require building a steadfast enterprise-wide framework for cyber resilience and data protection across the entire mobility matrix. Modern transit grids rely on continuous, low-latency telemetry loops between autonomous fleets, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication nodes, edge-computing traffic sensors, and centralised smart city control centers; introducing wider attack surfaces, where a single breached node can compromise physical vehicle safety and critical municipal infrastructure. This keynote addresses cyber resilience and personal data protection including zero-trust network protocols, and privacy-by-design frameworks required to defend the integrated mobility ecosystem against sophisticated signal spoofing, ransomware threats, and systemic data leaks without inducing operational latency.
The pursuit of zero-casualty corridors is driving a convergence between physical transport infrastructure and digital machine intelligence. With the rapid evolution of smart highways, cognitive structures, and intelligent traffic management networks, the safety paradigm has shifted from reactive mitigation to real-time, predictive prevention. Embedding distributed sensor arrays, computer vision, and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication nodes directly into the transit grid are transforming roads into active safety partners. This discussion brings together infrastructure operators, technology pioneers, and policy strategists to analyse how an integrated ecosystem will eliminate human error, optimise traffic flow under extreme environmental stress, and build a zero-fatality transport backbone.
Saudi Arabia has moved from discussing autonomy to operating it: self-driving vehicle pilots have carried public passengers in Riyadh, permits have been issued to international robotaxi operators, legal frameworks and traffic regulations have been updated to cover autonomous vehicles. This keynote addresses the far harder transition from pilot to scheduled public service and examines the systematic rollout of autonomous transport layers across mixed-autonomy fleets, freight and last-mile networks, and municipal public transit grids. The session also addresses the challenges of physical infrastructure adaptation including continuous digital connectivity, fleet-to-grid, and safety regulations.
The parking asset is becoming the most technologically dense point in the network. As ride-hailing networks expand, e-commerce deliveries surge, and personal vehicle fleets grow, the competition for physical space at the curb and within parking structures has triggered unprecedented congestion, double-parking, and lost economic productivity. The traditional, static parking spot must evolve into an intelligent, digitised asset that can adapt to changing demands in real time. Maximising urban throughput requires transforming the access, stopping, and parking layers into highly organised digital mobility hubs.