Personal Travel Companion
The Personal Travel Companion scenario aims to demonstrate the capabilities provided by the future Internet technologies for multi-modal travel assistance, mainly in urban and inter-urban areas (long distances journey are also taken into account).
More precisely, this scenario features three main applications aimed to provide to (1) travellers, (2) vehicle drivers and (3) transports operators the benefits of dynamic multimodal journeys planning and follow-up:
- Travellers: it will help them to plan and adjust in real time a multi-modal journey from door to door
- Vehicle drivers: it will allow them to easily book and execute ride sharing on their way to their own destination
- Transport operators: it will provide them with the complete information necessary to initiate demand-driven transportation
Dynamic multi-modal journey
In essence, this application is made of two parts aiming to provide better (i.e., quicker, more comfortable, cheaper and greener) mobility to daily commuters and other travellers by a better, demand-driven allocation of transportation means and provision of real time information for the pre-trip planning and journey execution.
The trip-planning proposal takes into account the current means of transportation, the traveller’s context and preferences, the city rules and the current requirements & constraints. During the journey, events occurring on the transport network are monitored and analysed, and if they impact the traveller’s journey, an automatic update of his/her planning is sent.
Dynamic ride sharing
Ride sharing is an essential aspect of the multi-modal journey and the most immediate mean to enhance urban mobility byusingby using, for a segment of one’s journey, the transportation capacity of another vehicle (professional or private), while this vehicle is on the way to its own destination.
While common ride corresponds to on-the-fly pick-up of a traveller by a driver on his/her way to some destination, shared car implies that the driver and the traveller agree in advance on an itinerary and pick-up location outside of the normal itinerary to go to one’s destination.
A private driver providing his/her destination to the Instant Mobility itinerary system receives an optimized itinerary on the basis of the system overall knowledge of the traffic. Once the driver has accepted the itinerary, he/she may also indicate one’s acceptance to receive common ride proposals from the Personal Travel Companion. During the trip, common rides with traveller(s) are proposed to the driver with the rating of the proposed traveller(s). For each agreed proposal between the driver and the traveller, the application manages everything from meeting point, to in-journey security and billing.
The Dynamic ride sharing application also allows managing the sharing of a vehicle between multiple successive drivers by fixing meeting point for the handover of the car between drivers, including the various checks of car status, etc, which would be extremely useful for rental car companies, taxi or city-provided electric vehicle fleets.
Optimized public transport usage
This application expresses a vision where collective transport operators, either public (bus, metro, train, etc) or private (car pooling or taxi sharing managers) federate complementary offers and improve service flexibility taking advantage of Future Internet capabilities.
The transport operators will get information about individual passengers’ travelling plans and match their vehicles, timetables and routes.
Additionally, they are able to monitor in real‐time the occupation of their own stations & stops and vehicles and to detect any service disruption, evaluate corresponding time delays and previsions to recover normal service.
The collective travel offer of the future is also envisioned to be seamlessly extendable by European‐wide cooperation to the geographical and functional areas of responsibility of other (regional) transport operators.