Complementary Travel Expert Services - S2R-OC-IP4-01-2019

Deadline: Jun 18, 2019  
CALL EXPIRED

SPECIFIC CHALLENGE

People are traveling around daily for business trips, on holiday, weekend travel or other private purposes. They want to get a large choice of multi-modal offers adapted to their preferences, and they need additional information to make an informed choice before selecting a proposal.

One of the specific challenges of this call is to classify complete itineraries with respect to different categories, including but not restricted to, the environmental impact (e.g. energy consumption, NOx emission, carbon footprint), the waiting time between legs, the accessibility of the modes for disabled people, the overcrowded legs in peak hours.

The second challenge, contributing also to the environmental impact, is to to facilitate access to rail transport, for example by increasing the occupancy rate of private cars when used in combination with public transport. This is specifically the case for the first and last mile in rural areas.

SCOPE

In order to address the above mentioned challenges, the awarded project should conduct the following activities:

(1) Choice criteria for travel planning

Investigate how relevant categories can be defined for the whole trip or for legs of the trip, investigate what is already available and develop algorithms to propose quantitative estimates. Categories could include:

 Environmental aspects : o Carbon footprint;

o Noise and vibration emission;
o Total energy consumption;
o NOx,Sulphur oxide (SO2), other type of emission;

•   Comfort aspects: waiting time, stress, number of interchanges, etc.

•   Specific needs for disabled people: access, walking time and distance, etc.

•   other, traffic conditions, etc.

It should be studied and defined by the awarded project, how these different categories could be combined in clusters.

In addition, the action should investigate the factors that could influence a consumer decision based on the categories provided and propose the best way how this information should be used (to help consumers towards choosing more sustainable transport modes).

These categories shall be provided to the travellers while planning their trip, as one of the decision factors. It could also be used by the transport authorities to propose incentives for when the traveller respects specific targets in the multimodal journey (e.g. emission threshold per km).

Activities are related to TD4.2 and TD4.5.

(2) RideSharinginamulti-modaljourneycontextforincorporationintheShift2RailIP4ecosystem

In order to achieve a full seamless multimodal travel experience and make “door-to-door” multimodal journeys a reality, access to the rail mode for the first and last mile of a multimodal trip, especially in the rural areas, will have to be facilitated. Since most of car riders travel alone between their home and the station, they can offer some available car seats between the station and the surrounding area.

Problems in the past have always been the difficulty of finding users making identical trips and the reluctance of passengers to share their cars. These problems tend to be particularly severe in rural areas. Thus the first stage should be behavioural studies to understand the key for a successful system, taking a sample of existing passengers and examining the degree to which they could be persuaded to ride-share.

The principle is that when dealing with an intermodal trip, some of the travellers will use their own car for the first or last mile. They can propose to share/offer some seats through the Travel Companion, and this option will become visible to potential passengers. Country specific legal aspects in conveyance of passengers should be taken into consideration.

The information will be the base of a so-called crowd-based Transport Service Provider (TSP), and will be accessible thanks to the Interoperability Framework. Development will divided into two parts:

•   An Application that runs “as a service”, acting as a crowd-based TSP

  Aim of this topic is the development of algorithms and proof of concept to allow travellers to share their (car) rides, incl. offering, ticketing, settlement, validation and tracking. This TSP will be considered in the trip planning phase of other travellers.

•   An Application that runs as part of the Travel Companion through integration of specific modules

Allowing the traveller offering the car seats to manage their offers, and to check the validity of the Entitlement/Token generated for the other travellers.

The objective is first and foremost to improve the connection with rural areas thus facilitating access to the rail and increasing its attractiveness as part of a multi-modal travel experience. Moreover, this action will help reducing the number of single-occupants car trips. It should also investigate algorithms for the optimal synchronization of sharing mobility solutions and other transportation modes with the rail service, as well as algorithms for the optimal matching between drivers and riders within a ridesharing system, which can represent the last mile solution of a rail-based multimodal journey. Those activities are meant to be incorporated in the S2R IP4 ecosystem, enlarging its capabilities and enabling new Transport Service Providers towards the use of the Shift2Rail Interoperation framework.

Activities related to TD4.1, TD 4.2, TD4.3, TD4.4 and TD 4.5 of the S2R MAAP.

For these activities, the project should cover the following aspects: state of the art, passenger survey and best practices, realistic target performances and definition of KPIs, but also implementation of proof of concepts (including tests and validation), and finally recommendations.

The proposed options must remain compatible with the approach currently developed within IP452, and must allow for the adaptation of the interoperability framework mechanisms.

The project is expected to reach TRL 5 by the end of the project.

COMPLEMENTARITY

As specified in section 2.3.1 of AWP 2019, in order to facilitate the contribution to the achievement of S2R objectives, the options regarding 'complementary grants' of the S2R Model Grant Agreement and the provisions therein, including with regard to additional access rights to background and results for the purposes of the complementary grant(s), will be enabled in the corresponding S2R Grant Agreements.

The action stemming from this topic will also be complementary to actions carried out within the following projects:

 S2R-CFM-IP4-01-2018: Passenger service platform specifications for an enhanced multi- modal transport ecosystem including Mobility as a Service (MaaS).

 COHESIVE (GA777599).
 CONNECTIVE (GA 777522).

EXPECTED IMPACT

S2R-IP4 “IT Solutions for Attractive Railway Services” has the main goal of increasing the attractiveness of rail transport by providing a radical improvement to the current lack of capacity to perform a door- to-door journey as a seamless multimodal journey. Developing reliable information about relevant characteristics of the multi-modal journey and specifically about the environmental impact of all legs of a trip is a way to encourage the use of more sustainable modes, and specifically the rail. Moreover, besides a reliable rail system and easy to use ecosystem, the connection of the rural areas will be enhanced by taking into account the first and last mile.

The expected impacts are then:

•   Increase the number of passengers using public transport.

•   Improve the rail connection with the rural areas.

•   Minimise environmental pollution while traveling.

•   Propose additional criteria for informed decision making when planning a trip.

Type of Action: Research and Innovation Action (RIA)