Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EuTravel (Optimodal European Travel Ecosystem)

Teaser

EuTravel aimed to support the EU agenda towards an open and single market for mobility services by enabling transport and travel service providers (TSPs) an effective way to deliver customised services for multimodal trips organised in accordance with travellers’ own...

Summary

EuTravel aimed to support the EU agenda towards an open and single market for mobility services by enabling transport and travel service providers (TSPs) an effective way to deliver customised services for multimodal trips organised in accordance with travellers’ own criteria including environmental performance. Such services could include platforms for travellers to organise their own multimodal trips. EuTravel also aims at strengthening societal benefits that arise from supporting passenger rights to information, including people with reduced mobility. EuTravel is expected to encourage the development of innovative travel services and new business opportunities.
The high level project objectives are:

O1. Support the EU agenda towards an open and single European market for mobility services in travelling, by developing an open Optimodality Framework in harmony with all the relevant EU standards and regulations and addressing in a holistic manner the needs of travellers, service providers and policy makers. This will ensure better modal integration and resource utilisation; improved consumer choice, and seamless information flow to travel users including advice on their rights and policy support.

O2. Support travel stakeholder organisations to invest and develop ICT infrastructure and services and publish content, enabling travellers to make an informed choice and make use of any mode of transport. For this an ecosystem will be developed as an open innovation foundation, promoting openness, scalability and easy participation for transport and travel stakeholders for both B2B and B2C distribution. The ecosystem will enable organisations to perform cost-effective integration of existing systems and to jointly create value added Optimodal services supporting existing and new systems. In the EuTravel Ecosystem, participating organisations will operate inter-connected end to end itineraries forming functions linked to search and booking/ticketing services, compliance and travel intelligence sources including Big data.

O3. Support travel stakeholder organisations produce innovative offers not previously possible, respecting the environment. The EuTravel ecosystem will provide an innovation environment and a rich set of environmentally motivated optimisation services to help all travel related actors and stakeholders increase their product offers with Optimodal travel options. Special attention will be given to sectors possibly lagging in integration capabilities such as ferries and coaches/buses and new environmental travel ways.

O4. Promote the creation of content, “open and linked data” for travellers enriching the travelling experience and the route insights.

O5. Support all key travel industry players wishing to join forces towards realising an EU shared seamless mobility strategy and architecture. Attract the spontaneous and early participation of key travel industry players in the ecosystem by making it the environment of preference for consensus building, for participative involvement of travellers and for visibility of important technology, business and policy developments.

Work performed

The project demonstrates a way to present to travellers what their options are when they want to go from location A to location B in a way that does not penalise or ignore some options in favour of others and secondly allow them to book and manage all the legs of their trip from within a single application. The Optimodality Framework integrates processes, data, and systems in a manner that eliminates interoperability barriers. The proof of concept of the framework is realised through the implementation of the Optimodality platform, which is the backbone of the EuTravel ecosystem. Key part of the platform is the “API of APIs” which deals with interoperability challenges in the transportation and travel-related industry. To realize the “API of APIs”, EUTRAVEL developed a Common Information Model (CIM) and the semantic version of it i.e. the EuTravel Unifying Ontology. These provide the foundation for the EuTravel ecosystem solution delivering a unifying, global view over a multitude of travel APIs and formats and enable seamless integration of European travel data and services.
The key scientific and technological achievements are:
•Prototype of the Optimodality Platform including the API of APIs. The API of APIs provides an innovative technology stack that facilitates integration of various data sources.
• An Object Oriented Unified Data Structure for data exchange between distributed heterogeneous systems (CIM). The CIM consolidates all data structures by creating a general data form on which the “API of APIs” operates.
• A Unifying Travel Ontology and mappings between the CIM and selected standards. The Unifying Travel Ontology builds on schema.org and consolidates a number of existing standards across modes.
• The Connectivity Infrastructure of the Optimodality platform, which includes:
-the API’s Registry,
-the Data & Semantics Transformation mechanism, which processes the information from all available data sources and facilitates its transformation in a CIM-compatible form.
• An innovative Optimisation Service that deals with performance challenges posed by excessive number of included nodes and edges in transportation networks.
• A multimodal journey planner.
• Prototype Semantic Components (EuTravel Chatbot, Travel Annotator, Semantic Search).
• Value Added Services (VAS) based on the functionality of the API of APIs:
– Analytics and Business Intelligence Dashboard
– Mobile application enabling user engagement and feedback
• A unified Dashboard for KPIs Monitoring in the Living Lab
• A set of use cases for multimodal travelling addressing both B2C and B2B perspectives.
• A Summary of the legal and regulatory issues affecting the development of an Optimodal Transport Ecosystem in the European Union’. Consolidated report on recommendations for the wide adoption of multimodal travelling.
• Conference, elearning courses, scientific publications and white papers.

Final results

EuTravel goes beyond the state of the art by delivering:
- The API of APIs, a single, configurable API for multimodal travel that simplifies the way travel and transport service providers systems interoperate, and consequently improves the quality of services to the end users.
- Discoverability of distributors, supporting the EU agenda towards an open and single market for mobility services.
- The Ever-evolving domain model (CIM) that enables the incorporation of new innovative modes.
- A platform that facilitates quick integration and interoperability, by automating integration repetitive tasks and reducing the time to market.
- Improved insights for service providers through advanced User profiling via identification of usage patterns, that facilitates the development of big data analytics applications.
- A Knowledge Graph - a multimodal Semantic Graph Data where data is structured and hierarchically represented and enriched with API of APIs anonymized usage data.
- A real-time, cross-mode Minimum Connection Time (MCT) estimation service which caches available MCT data in a large array offering MCTs for each pair of transit station in the European area. The service, exploits the semantic graph and verifies and infers missing MCTs from indirect paths.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.eutravelproject.eu.