Rationale
70% of the EU's energy is consumed in cities. In such environments , 40% of petrol is used for finding somewhere to park and 80% of urban trips involve just one person travelling alone. Cities – and citizens – are key partners when it comes to reaching the EU's objectives of 20% energy saving by 2020 and when it comes to developing a low carbon economy by 2050. Cities therefore have a huge potential for energy saving through smarter use of transport resources and intelligent technology integration for improved mobility services.
However , “there are relatively few ITS systems and services that specifically address environmental objectives. But ITS can indeed help to reduce emissions and save energy through a better demand management including the use of road charging and access management. Better multi-modal information and feedback to drivers (eco-driving) are also valuable instruments”. This can happen in a cross-city or cross-border manner, but naturally also in an urban framework. A change of mobility habits in the average European citizen is needed. This should be proposed and reinforced by new and better mobility services at hand and a clear conception of the benefits for such citizen, the city and the entire society.
Reducing congestion through better management of demand and capacity can be achieved through dynamic traffic management based on real-time data from roads/streets, vehicles and even mobile phones, and the use of simulations and historic data can also improve the strategies to mitigate congestion. In this regard ICT can provide a lot of information that can help optimize the management of such a complex system, but this information can come from very diverse systems. Managing these data and delivering a satisfactory service on a need-basis is challenging. The ever-increasing quantity of information that can be captured, stored, processed, aggregated and communicated among users and providers of mobility services calls for a transformation of our current idea of cooperative communication around the Future Internet concept; this transformation has to be driven from the cloud-computing concept.
Technology-wise, this whole idea should be built on top of a thorough analysis of the city’s mobility requirements, sources, sinks and current infrastructures, and be based on a number of components able to securely process heterogeneous data and deliver multi-platform access to real-time information and services. More specifically, this platform must be able to guide the operation and control of the transportation companies, to know where the user is and where he wants to go and to deliver him incentive-based and complete services on the fly. Multi-modal travel information services provided before and during the journey (including advice on environmental conditions) can assist the traveller to make responsible mode and route choices, and to be aware of how and up to which point these choices are beneficial in terms of energy efficiency.
Summing up, our three main motivators for carrying out the MoveUs project are:
[1] The need for availability and take-up of European new multimodal, personalized, sustainable, safe and reliable smart mobility services
[2] The need for user-engagement, through incentives, for allowing the citizen to act as a data source and to know how a habit change can reflect on real energy savings
[3] The need for solutions capable of capture, store, process, aggregate and communicate large amounts of mobility data, that can be used by a number of stakeholders, thus representing viable business cases.
Concept
MoveUS means ICT cloud-based platform and mobility services available, universal and safe for all users. As a result of the research activity along the project, MoveUS will deliver:
1. A cloud-based mobility management platform, which will collect input data from distributed heterogeneous sources and process these data to infer valuable information of the traffic status and users’ mobility patterns, ensuring data privacy and security all along the handling process
2. An API toolkit offered as a platform extension, which will provide developers and third parties access to these data.
3. A set of innovative user-centric services supported by an effective incentive-based model, aimed at assisting users’ mobility and fostering behavioral changes towards sustainable transport modes.
4. A fully integrated smart mobility application (MoveUS APP), running either on users’ smartphones or control centers owned by Local Authorities or Transport Operators.
5. Energy efficiency assessment tools to measure users’ carbon footprint and the energy gains vs. consumption for the ICT solutions applied to each pilot.
MoveUs will therefore integrate, in a cloud-computing environment, different transport and traffic management components and future internet technologies which are able to capture, store and elaborate a relevant and heterogeneous quantity of mobility and energy assessment data. These data will draw from asynchronous user-generated information (e.g. mobility patterns, preferences), synchronous user-generated data (e.g. position in real time), historic databases (e.g. weather reports and trends, public transportation schedules) and data from mobility companies and vehicles in real-time. Such vast amount of information will then be used for developing an API toolkit for third parties plus a wide range of innovative, personalized and incentive-based mobility services.
Which services? For each of the three piloting cities in the MoveUs project, a thorough study will be carried out in the beginning stages of the work. This study will analyze the current infrastructures, the main development trends and programmes already in place, and what the citizens want. With our “green, multimodal, personalized, sustainable, safe and private, reliable and extensible” idea in mind and the aforementioned results with regards to city and citizens’ requirements, the MoveUS services will be deployed and localised in each piloting city for all relevant stakeholders to use. The reader is referred to chapter 1.1.5 for more details on the technology and services to be implemented.
A preliminary study of different piloting cities, their particularities and their infrastructures has already been carried out, and the selected ones are Madrid – a big capital city starting to position itself in the smart cities landscape, Genoa – a medium-sized Mediterranean smart city and the largest seaport in Italy, and Tampere – a small Nordic inland city with a contrasted career in the smart city world. More details about the piloting cities can be found in chapters 1.1.4 and 2.4
With regards to the users, in each of our cities, the project will establish a Living Labs approach for the MpveUs pilots, which will emphasize the participation of representative samples of the urban population in the phases of requirements collection, co-creation, use and evaluation of the mobility services. These users will not only be end-users but also other relevant stakeholders such as SMEs, associations and public bodies. They are the ones to propose, by eliciting their everyday requirements, sustainable business cases for the MoveUs technology. The selection of the respective samples (with different demographic characteristics) will be performed by the cities themselves and their supporting technical partners. The involvement of representative samples of the population will allow the project to study the acceptance and penetration of the services within specific segments of the population.
Summing up, the MoveUs platform, API toolkit and services will be designed to flexibly enough address different urban contexts in Europe, considering the different maturity stages of cities in the process of becoming smart cities. The piloted cities constitute a small but well representative sample of European cities in terms of size, socio-cultural and technology/mobility infrastructures and this will yield interesting impacts.