Latest News

1. April 29, 2013: A Team of researchers from Inria involved with TravelDashboard were awarded €2500 for the "mashup prize" as part of the OpenDataLab event of RATP, the Paris transport company, for their app "NeverBLate"
2. April 02, 2013: ERCIM News, Special theme: Mobile Computing contains the article "TravelDashboard - a Framework for the Delivery of Personalized Mobility Services to Urban Travellers" by project partners

The Problem

With over 70% of the world’s entire population expected to be living in cities by 2050, supporting citizens’ mobility within the urban environment is a priority for municipalities worldwide[1]. Although public multi-modal transit systems, coupled with integrated fare management and road user charging, are necessary to better manage mobility, they are not sufficient. Citizens must be offered personalized travel information, where and when such information is needed to take decisions that will make their journeys more efficient and enjoyable. Notably, such information is not purely qualitative (e.g., bus timetable, live bus tracking), but crucially subjective (e.g., crowdedness of trains, heat of tube platforms, sociability of the coaches). The perception and value attached to this information varies substantially, not only across people (e.g., different tolerance to delays, different perception of crowdedness, different taste in the social environment), but also for the same person in different contexts (e.g., work commute, leisure trip with the family)[2]. Thanks to the increased abundance of smart phones (equipped with various types of physical sensors, as well as enabling the users to easily report phenomena), the field of mobile participatory sensing[3] has emerged recently, and can be leveraged towards providing a more fine-grain and up-to-date view of the city’s transportation system.

Goal and Objectives

In order to address the problems introduced above, a pan-European team of partners at Alcatel/Lucent from Ireland and Belgium, Ambientic, Inria, Systematic, and Thales from France, and Transport for London (TfL), and University College London (UCL) from the UK, have pooled their resources together for TravelDashboard, a project that works towards an open source middleware platform, enriched with personalized mobility services for urban travelers, evaluated via real-life demonstrators assessment, and accompanied by novel business models.