IT2Rail is a first step towards achieving the objectives of Shift2Rail’s 4th Innovation Programme, dedicated to solutions for transport multimodality, seamlessness and sustainability. The overall aim is to provide a new seamless travel experience, giving access to a complete multimodal travel offer which connects the first and last mile to long distance journeys by:
• Transforming global travel interactions into a fully integrated and customised experience;
• Providing a door-to-door (D2D) multi modal travel experience, through services distributed by multiple providers;
• Helping operators to adapt their level of service, better to satisfy customer expectations and optimise their own operations.
IT2Rail, as an initiating ‘lighthouse’ project for IP4, restricts itself to tackling comodality only. The common domains enable it to act as a precursor to later IP4 calls which will also tackle the intermodality flavour. Comodality is where the passenger’s selected travel solution consists of an aggregation of Transport Service Provider (TSP) products/services, but none of the contributing TSPs are aware of the contribution of the others. Therefore multiple ‘tickets’ (transport contracts) are established. Intermodality is where the passenger’s selected travel solution consists of an aggregation of TSP products/services, therefore establishing a single ‘ticket’.
Aside from its exclusive focus on ‘comodality’, IT2Rail’s scope is pitched at a much smaller scale than that of IP4, in line with respective budget allocations and in terms of the following dimensions:
• depth of functionality;
• geographical coverage in terms of passenger-flow ‘corridors’;
• number of transport modes;
• number of transport operators;
• full end to end coverage of travel ‘processes’ i.e. re-accommodation, after-sales transactions and payment/settlement solutions are not tackled in IT2Rail.
The practical objectives of IT2Rail encompass a quick win approach through a concrete integration of preliminary technical demonstrators of the core technologies offered in Shift2Rail IP4. The user-centric use cases have been defined as specific instantiations of the open concepts, which benefit from a completely scalable architecture to be used in IP4. This approach is addressing all the key challenges of the work program, supporting a complete door-to-door multimodal travel offer and proposing a seamless integration of the very diverse existing and future services for planning, one-stop-shop ticketing, and real-time re-accommodation.
Moreover, thanks to an Interoperability framework which insulates travel applications from the standards fragmentation in multimodal transport, IT2Rail liberates business-model innovations in the market-place, guaranteeing the economic self-sustainability of these e-services in the long-term.
