From Bilbao to Oslo, intermodal mobility solutions and interfaces for people and goods, supported by an innovative communication network

Project Information

BONVOYAGE

Grant agreement ID: 635867

DOI

10.3030/635867

Project closed

EC signature date 14 April 2015

Start date 1 May 2015

End date 30 April 2018

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 4 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 4 000 000,00

Coordinated by

CONSORZIO NAZIONALE INTERUNIVERSITARIO PER LE TELECOMUNICAZIONI
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BONVOYAGE (From Bilbao to Oslo, intermodal mobility solutions and interfaces for people and goods, supported by an innovative communication network)

Reporting period: 2016-11-01 to 2018-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ever growing mobility of citizens and goods is making Intelligent Transport System (ITS) a must-have for modern cities and countries. Although in many countries national ITS applications already exist, they are often fragmented and uncoordinated, thus preventing or making it very difficult to get a geographical continuity of ITS services.
In this regard, the European Community has acknowledged these difficulties and, as a consequence, the Directive 2010/40/EU established a legal framework for developing specifications to make ITS interoperable across borders. The regulation introduce the National Access Point (NAP) entity, as single point of access for ITS services that each Nation should provide. Moreover, the regulation gives precise requirements on travel data formats (DATEX II, Siri, NeTEx, etc.) to be used and on fundamental and recommended system-level services that must be offered, such as discovery and linking services. However, it does not (yet) pose constraints on how to implement them.

BONVOYAGE projects deals with the cross-border ITS services recommended by Directive 2010/40/EU, specifically the Delegated Act for the provision of EU-wide multimodal travel information services (1926/2017). BONVOYAGE proposes an innovative platform to implement discovery and linking services, and uses these services to design advanced multi-modal trip planners.

The BONVOYAGE platform can be exploited by:
• end-users, to provide the best information to go from a place to another, before and during the travel, door to door, by using any combination of any transport means, taking into account real-time conditions and user preferences;
• EU Member States for the implementation of the European Union Directive 2010/40/EU (Action A) through an open and federated architecture able to federate local routing services (aka soloists) and data sources, exploiting the functionality of an innovative information-centric networking approach
• Big and Small ITS stakeholders to advertise and provide the access to their routing services or data sources

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The BONVOYAGE project has designed, developed, and tested a platform for personalized door-to-door multimodal trip planning that integrates sources of non-real-time and real-time travel information, mono-modal or multimodal routing services provided by different stakeholders, green loyalty programmes, multipart tariff schemes and machine learning based user profiling based on user feedbacks and behaviours (e.g. from wearable devices). The platform is supported by an innovative communication network named Internames, implementing the Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, which collects and distributes data requiring large scale dissemination and data certification.

The platform system is divided in three layers (Figure 1): application, orchestration, and infrastructure layer. The orchestration and the infrastructure layers offer discovery and linking services which are in line with European Union Directive 2010/40/EU recommendations, specifically those for the provision of EU-wide multimodal travel information services, which draw a legal framework for developing specifications to make ITS interoperable across borders.

The discovery services enable the discovery of travel data sources and routing/journey resolvers in a given geographical area. The linking services make possible to combine the results coming from different routing resolvers to build a complete door-to-door multimodal journey plan. The application layer exploits available orchestrators as backend services for journey planning applications.

The project devised an exemplary journey planning application base on the platform that, in addition, uses machine learning algorithms based on user feedbacks (e.g. wearable sensors detecting transport mode and stress level, etc.) to profile user and personalize the journey plan thus enhancing the resulting user experience.

The architecture has been integrated in a cross-border demonstrator including an orchestrator and several soloists, specifically developed by the project, covering Norway, Spain (city of Bilbao), Italy (city of Rome) and Europe with airplanes. The demonstrator includes a Google soloist as well, showing the possibility of integration of services of big and small ITS players in a unique federated European system. End-users have been involved for validation tests with positive feedbacks.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The BONVOYAGE’s progress beyond the state is focussed in a set of areas that maximize socio-economic impact and societal implications.

Directive 2010/40/EU. BONVOYAGE proposes a proof of concept for a possible architecture matching the EU regulation which fosters the "harmonization" of services offered by National Access Points. Indeed, nowadays (2018) National Access Points start to be deployed but in a scattered way, i.e. there is no interconnection among them. BONVOYAGE system creates a federation of National Access Points and practically answer to the following technical questions: which practical services a NAP should (mandatory) offer? Through which common API ? How can different NAPs interact each other ? How to handle data certification? Who is responsible for data validity? How linking services can actually work? Which are the involved stakeholders ? How system can scale?

Travel optimizer. The BONVOYAGE travel optimization is carried out in a distributed way. Multimodality can be achieved by orchestrating distributed uni-modality resolvers (for carpooling, train, bike etc.). Defining a collaborative pattern between different algorithms is a step forward in the state of the art and a way to include local-optimal solutions in a multimodal and otherwise cross-border itinerary, in a competitive or collaborative architecture.

Personalization via feedback and sensors. Innovative machine learning algorithms have been devised to profile the user and personalize its journey plan. The algorithm uses implicit feedbacks derived from user previous choices and innovative explicit feedbacks coming from wearable devices, such as stress level and transport mode recognition.

ICN travel centric services. We adopt the Information Centric Networking paradigm (ICN) to implement a federated NoSQL Spatial Database System that can be used for realizing an interconnected NAP System. The federated DB has got properties tailored to NAP applications including: user defined selection of the actual storage location; spatial queries sent only to sites having data in the query region; data owners are responsible for data validity rather than the database owner. ICN technology has been also extended to support geographical publish/subscribe services that has been used for the efficient, large-scale, delivery of real-time ITS data, such as the DATEX II ones.

In terms of socio-economic impact, the project foresee a federated system for EU-wide multimodal travel information services, where not only transport stakeholders have a rule, but also the Member States with their National Access Points. The federation of open-data “and” open-services may accelerate the deployment of future multimodal journey services in Europe, opening the market not only to major stakeholders but also to small local ones,

With BONVOYAGE solutions, everyone, companies or providers, big or small, can have a part in the cross-border door-to-door planning to effectively offer the best choices for citizens.

System Architecture