Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BONVOYAGE (From Bilbao to Oslo, intermodal mobility solutions and interfaces for people and goods, supported by an innovative communication network)
Teaser
The aim of BONVOYAGE is to find the best way to go from a place to another, door to door, for passengers and goods, by using any combination of any transport means. To this end, the BONVOYAGE platform integrates travel information and planning and ticketing services, and...
Summary
The aim of BONVOYAGE is to find the best way to go from a place to another, door to door, for passengers and goods, by using any combination of any transport means. To this end, the BONVOYAGE platform integrates travel information and planning and ticketing services, and automatically analyse: non-real-time data from heterogeneous databases (on road, railway and urban transport systems); real-time measured data (traffic, weather forecasts, data from smartphone and wearable sensors); user profiles; user feedback. The platform is supported by an innovative Information-Centric communication Network (ICN) that collects and distributes the data required to optimize a travel.
In more details, we can break up the main aim in three differentiated goals:
• for the end-users, to provide the best information to go from a place to another, with on-trip assistance, taking into account real-time conditions and user preferences;
• for transport companies, to extend their scope towards door-to-door services;
• for the EU and ITS community, to provide an open and federated architecture able to cluster travel solvers and data sources.
Innovative characteristics of BONVOYAGE, with respect to current solutions include:
• supporting different optimality criteria and ranking options of multimodal trips for both passengers and goods, taking into account real time conditions and user preferences and profiles, including dynamic information like preferred transport modes and user’s stress level related to different transport modes, as estimated from previous travels and through data collected by wearable and smartphone sensors
• facilitating the large-scale search, sharing and delivery of transport solutions and related data among transport providers, travel service operators, applications and private citizens (e.g. for car sharing purposes, hitching a lift)
• allowing transport providers to keep their data and services in their premises, with their formats and interfaces, rather than transferring them to a third, centralized party
• allowing travel operators and journey planning applications to get data directly from the transport providers rather than from a third party
• allowing any one to set up access restriction and privacy policies on published data and then verify the owner and the authenticity of published data
• allowing a federated de-centralized operation instead that a single centralized solution (in accordance with Directive 2010/40/EU, which establishes a framework for developing specifications to make ITS interoperable across borders)
• sharing all data by means of a new telecommunications network (ICN - Internames) versus the current TCP/IP Internet
• Open system versus closed system
Work performed
The project started on May 1, 2015. It is planned to last for 36 months. The first reporting period covers the first 18 months.
The main achievements of the project so far are listed below:
- Definition of the BONVOYAGE architecture, based on the concept of a federation of heterogeneous data sources and travel solvers (soloists), supported by a global discovery service, and used by different journey planner applications through internal orchestrating functions
- A set of urban solvers, for the cities of OSLO and BILBAO, including car-pooling services
- A Multi-objective Optimization Tool, the core element of the orchestrator, based on the concept of solver federation, problem spatial decomposition, and service personalization by user profiling
- OpenGeoBase, a multi-tenant federated spatial database, exploiting information-centric networking, for the federation and the discovery of heterogeneous data sources and solvers
- A publish/subscribe communication infrastructure for dissemination of real-time travel data to simplify management of DATEX II data
- A preliminary BONVOYAGE journey planning application based on a federated set of soloists and data sources
- A User Profiler Tool (UPT), able to take into account user’s feedbacks for personalization purposes. Feedbacks are derived both from user requests and choices, and from sensors identifying travel modality and stress level
- Design of a Green Score Policy algorithm to select compositions of means of transport with a low level of CO2 consumption
- Design of a Tariff Scheme algorithm for multimodal pricing rules for reducing pollution.
In Figure 1 we show the BONVOYAGE architectural framework, with the main architectural blocks and their relationships to the technological Workpackages. In Figure 2 we report the same figure by adding the main achievements over the architecture diagram, to show how they relate to the functional blocks.
Final results
A technology-intensive transportation system that progresses beyond the state-of-the-art does not only innovate the science and machinery behind it, but also impacts our modern society, where mobility of people and goods has steadily increased over the past decades.
This is why, in the following, we outline BONVOYAGE’s progress beyond the state of the art focusing in a set of areas that maximize socio-economic impact and societal implications.
Travel optimizer. The BONVOYAGE travel optimization is carried out in a distributed way. Multimodality can be achieved by orchestrating distributed uni-modality solvers (for carpooling, train, bike etc.). The service orchestrator knows the characteristics of the different solvers and makes use of those that are the best suited for a given travel request and for a given user. Defining a collaborative pattern between different algorithms is a step forward in the state of the art and a way to include local-optimal solutions in a multimodal and otherwise cross-border itinerary, in a competitive or collaborative architecture.
Personalization via feedback and sensors. The User Profiler Tool is used to collect implicit and explicit user feedbacks, used for personalizing the user journey solution by properly configuring the orchestrator with specific user profile based parameters. The User Profiler Tool is able to jointly take into account the user request and the feedback choice carried out by the user as she selects one or more travel solutions; it is also able to exploit crowd-sourced data for automatic identification of user’s behaviours in terms of on-trip user stress level and current transportation mode, by means of sophisticated data analysis models applied to data coming from sensors and smartphones. By properly combining user feedbacks and orchestration the BONVOYAGE planning service is the first able to benefit from such a user profiling in a distributed environment.
Internames for travel centric services. We adopt the Information Centric Networking paradigm (ICN) and extend it to implement Internames, which spans across heterogeneous domains and natively supports publish/subscribe primitives that are used for the efficient, large-scale, delivery of real-time ITS data, such as the DATEX II ones.
OpenGeoBase. OGB is a federated spatial database that exploits Internames, and with respect to other NoSQL databases support geographical sharing of data (vs hash sharing), geographical routing of queries (vs query flooding) and data-level security (vs table-level security). These OGB features make it a candidate for realizing a network of de-centralized/chained National Access Points offering discovery functionality for ITS data and services, as envisaged by the 2010/40/EU ITS Directive (Action A Travel information and linking services).
Website & more info
More info: http://bonvoyage2020.eu/.