Door to Door Information for Airports and Airlines

Project Information

DORA

Grant agreement ID: 635885

DOI 10.3030/635885

Closed project

EC signature date 22 April 2015

Start date 1 June 2015

End date 30 September 2018

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost € 4 682 895,00

EU contribution € 4 682 895,00

Coordinated by

EURESCOM-EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND STRATEGIC STUDIES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DORA (Door to Door Information for Airports and Airlines)

Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2018-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The main goal of the DORA project was to design and establish a seamless and integrated information system that helps passengers to optimize travel time of an entire journey – Door-to-Door – involving air travel. The entire journey includes traveling from an origin of the trip, e.g. home, to airplane at departing airport, including assistance for the travelers while moving through airport building, as well as from the plain and through the arrival airport to the final destination of the journey.

To ensure it, the DORA integrated information system, which was created within the project together with necessary software platforms and end user applications, was aiming at the reduction of overall time needed for a typical European air travel including the necessary time needed for transport to and from the airports. The integrated solution is providing a single point of visualization – a smart phone APP – of the overall trip eliminating the need for combining information (public transport schedules, ticket, maps, etc.) that has to be manually collected by travelers from different and heterogeneous sources of relevant information.

Accordingly, the DORA system provided mobile, seamless, and time optimized route recommendations for travels to the airport and time optimized routing within the airports, leading the passengers through terminals to the right security and departure gates. To enable it, DORA integrated all necessary real time information on disruptions in the land transport environments and on incidents in the airport terminals to provide the fastest route alternatives, ensuring the accessibility of airport and airplane at any time in accordance with individual passengers’ needs. To support the route optimization, the DORA project has investigated and designed technologies for recognition of waiting queues and indoor location services in airports, which were integrated into the entire DORA system. The DORA system has been designed in a generic way and provides software development templates and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to ensure that it can be widely adopted independently on passengers and airports locations.

During the project life time, the DORA system has been implemented and tested in realistic environments involving the cities of Berlin and Palma de Mallorca as well as the corresponding airports with involvement of real end users – air travelers – in the DORA pilot. Furthermore, the project analyzed usability of the provided solution from the perspective of the end users and other relevant stakeholders, by considering potential benefits for various stakeholder groups and related impacts, performed technical evaluation of the overall solution including performance evaluation of the system, and investigated various aspects of business perspectives for DORA achievements.

The main project results achieved during its life time are summarized below:
• Design, implementation, and integration of all DORA services and applications, needed to build the integrated information system for Door-to-Door journeys involving air travel, completed as planned
• Functional and performance testing of entire DORA system and all its components has been successfully performed
• High satisfaction of end users – air travelers who participated in the DORA pilot and used the DORA services – has been achieved, including significant potential in saving the overall travel time and overall convenience while travelling for the air passengers
• Transferability of the DORA solution has been ensured, so it can be implemented in other cities/regions and airports wide beyond implementations in Berlin and Palma.

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

Technical and legal requirements for the development of DORA system and for each of its core components have been defined. The related results are gathered in the public deliverables (available on the DORA website) D2.1 D2.2 D2.3 and D2.4.

DORA concept has been defined through specification of all basic DORA system components which will be integrated in the overall system. The related results are gathered in the public deliverables D3.2 D3.3 and D3.4

Based on the requirements and components specification, the DORA project performed development process of all necessary system components and services as well as their integration into the DORA system as follows:
• Waiting Time Detection service
• Indoor localization and routing service
• Flight routing service
• Intermodal Landside Router
• Profile service
• Strategic routing service
• Trip monitoring and navigation service
• Door-to-Door Journey Planner
• Operation Centre Application
• User DORA Applications for smart phone (iOS and Android) and Smart Watch

The entire DORA integrated system has been implemented in regions of Berlina and Palma de Mallorca, including airports in both cities, and successfully tested by real air passengers traveling between these two cities, who provided feedback on usability and impact of the DORA approach.
During the project life time, around 1,000 users experienced features of the DORA integrated system by using the DORA smart phone APP.

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)

By designing, specifying, implementing and integrating the entire DORA framework, the project consortium put in place all the required components together and test it under realistic conditions by involvement of real air travelers for the first time. So far, the DORA project provided first results from such complex pilot, available in the public domain.

Indoor localization and routing/navigation services have been investigated and implemented, providing a significant contribution to a currently still very challenging area of indoor navigation in various complex buildings and closed areas. In a number of cases, the DORA indoor navigation service performed much better than solutions currently available on the market or already deployed in the airports.

Reduction of overall travel time by applying DORA framework was evaluated by surveys with the real air travelers using the DORA and by calculations from a number of simulated trips done with and without using DORA services.
• Calculations: achieved reduction of travel time is 8% or around 31 minutes time saving on average for the trips between Berlin and Palma de Mallorca.
• Survey - estimation of time saving by air travelers:
o 43% travellers estimated 10 minutes saved
o 33% - 30 minutes
o 11% - 60 minutes
o 2% - 90 minutes
3% of the travelers did not claim any time savings and others were not able to provide the estimation.

DORA App also provides multimodal route planner with information on travel time, costs and CO2 emission which shows attractiveness of public transport, so that 29% of the users changed to public transport while traveling to/from airport because of DORA.

Finally, as the DORA project defined its expected impacts in line with the overall policy targets related to the Horizon 2020 MG1.3-2014 objective (addressed by the DORA project), the project outcomes are directly contributing to their achievement as follows:
• 90 % of the travels involving air transport within Europe can be completed in 4 hours door to door
• Passengers can make informed decisions
• Air transport is well connected to other modes