#Context
Shift2Rail(S2R) is the first European rail initiative to seek focused research and innovation (R&I) and market-driven solutions by accelerating the integration of new and advanced technologies into innovative rail product solutions. CONNECTIVE is one of the projects that integrate S2R Innovation Programme 4: IT solutions for attractive Railway services. IP4 is focused on defining an Attractive Railway System integrated seamlessly with all other modes of transport, enabling seamless Door-to-Door pan-European travel. Within this IP, CONNECTIVE is a key project that aims to provide other S2R-IP4 projects with a technical framework and a set of tools that will foster interoperability and digitalization of all transport ecosystem.
#Challenges
Currently, travellers are faced with barriers when trying to engage a journey mixing rail transport with other modes: these range from needing to access multiple sources for timetables and planning information, the need to carry and purchase multiple tickets to demonstrate the validity of the different parts of the journey, to adjust to different fare media, interfaces, devices, conventions, procedures and tools developed over the years by many retailers, operators, and distributors. Even if there is some level of standardisation within each mode, a passenger travelling over different transport modes is confronted with the lack of interoperability. This makes multimodality patchy and as a consequence citizens must often switch between sites, ticketing devices or offices in order to shop, book and pay the components of their intended journey – and must have multiple tickets to validate through the multimodal journey. IP4 is working to overcome this situation and improve the current lack of capacity to perform a door-to-door journey as a seamless multimodal journey. In this context, the main challenges are to allow seamless interconnection between heterogeneous systems and to provide a common business intelligence foundation to monitor, analyze and generate data from the IP4 ecosystem.
#Objectives
It aims to implement a new technical framework that will enhance the connection between the tools provided by other IP4 Projects and with the Service Transport Providers. This framework fosters the integration of information from the different sources and operators by easing the exchange and consumption of systems and services. Moreover, the new technical framework allows the integration of business analytics tools that will provide descriptive, predictive and prescriptive techniques.
Detailed objectives
• To define the architectural principles, requirements and innovative technologies of the Technical Framework.
• To create an open “Web of Transportation” to boost the digital transformation of the European Transport into a global service and data digital ecosystem.
• To create the semantic model and collect the ontologies to describe the whole IP4 domain.
• To provide tools and methodologies to allow different actors, systems and services, to easily join or interact with the ecosystem.
• To develop descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics using multimodal data sets generated by IP4 services, transport service providers and travellers.
• To develop anonymization and simulation techniques to guarantee privacy and confidentiality.
• To provide interactive and dynamic visualization capabilities, including new techniques such as Virtual Reality, in order to present business information.
• To expand components and resolvers developed in the Interoperability Framework and Business Analytics domains within IT2Rail.
• To integrate legacy systems, external services, and other S2R-IP4 components.
# Constraints
• Existing TSP systems must be kept mainly unchanged;
• Achieve interoperability through minimum standardization;
• Ensure market uptake with a near-zero cost;
