Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DORA (Door to Door Information for Airports and Airlines)

Teaser

DORA project is aiming at the design and establishment of a seamless and integrated information system that helps passengers optimise travel time from the origin of a trip to the airplane at the departing airport as well as from the arrival airport, to the final destination...

Summary

DORA project is aiming at the design and establishment of a seamless and integrated information system that helps passengers optimise travel time from the origin of a trip to the airplane at the departing airport as well as from the arrival airport, to the final destination. Accordingly, the DORA integrated information system, which will be created within the project together with necessary software platforms and end user applications, is aiming at the reduction of overall time needed for a typical European air travel including the necessary time needed for transport to and from the airports. The integrated solution will be providing consequently, beyond the added value of travel optimisation, a single point of visualization of the overall trip eliminating the need for combining information (public transport schedules, ticket, maps) that has to be collected manually by travellers from different and heterogeneous sources.

To ensure this, the DORA system (Figure 1) will provide mobile, seamless, and time optimised route recommendations for travels to the airport and time optimised routing within the airports, leading the passengers through terminals to the right security and departure gates. DORA will integrate all necessary real time information on disruptions in the land transport environments and on incidents in the airport terminals to provide the fastest route alternatives, ensuring the accessibility of airport and airplane at any time in accordance with individual passengers’ requirements. The DORA system will be designed in a generic way and provide software development templates and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to ensure that it can be widely adopted independently on passengers and airports locations.

In the project, the DORA system will be implemented and tested in realistic environments involving the cities of Berlin and Palma de Mallorca as well as their corresponding airports in both cities with involvement of approx. 500 real end users – passengers – in the trials. To support the passengers’ route optimisation, the DORA project will investigate and design technologies for recognition of waiting queues and indoor location services in airports, which will be integrated into the DORA system and tested within the project trials. Furthermore, the project will analyse usability of the provided solution from the perspective of the end users and other relevant stakeholders (Figure 2), by considering potential benefits for various stakeholder groups and related impacts, perform a technical evaluation of the overall solution including performance evaluation of the system, and investigate business perspectives of the DORA system.

The overall goal of the mentioned DORA project activities is to optimise and reduce the total travel time, taking into account origins and final destinations of the travels (home, office, hotels …), of air passengers and make sure that even in case of land traffic disruptions, critical situations and congestions at the airports the passengers arrive at the airport in time to complete all necessary clearance procedures before entering the plane and after landing at the destination airport.

Work performed

During the first 18 project months, the DORA consortium worked on several research and innovation items and achieved the corresponding results as presented below:

• Technical and legal requirements for the development of DORA system and for each of its core components: intermodal router, waiting time detection, indoor location and routing, and mobile smart phone application have been defined. For this purpose, an analysis of the market related to the integrated Information services for passengers have been performed, several user groups according to identified mobility profiles have been defined, and use cases to be considered for implementation and DORA project trials, involving all the relevant actors, goals and processes, have been described.

• DORA concept has been defined through specification of all basic DORA system components which will be integrated in the overall system and applied in the planned project trials, including the following: detailed DORA software and hardware architecture, specification of services for Indoor-Location, Waiting time detection and Door-to-Door-Routing, concept for Operation Centre Application, Identification of interdependency between services, specification of interfaces and data exchange, and specification of the end-user application.

• Based on the requirements and components specification, the DORA project has started development process of all necessary system components.

• An overall DORA evaluation plan has been defined and related activities on process and technical evaluation as well as usability consideration of the DORA approach and applications have been performed, to support development of various DORA components. Furthermore, an analysis of suitable cooperation and business models enabling exploitation of the DORA solution and application has been completed.

• Preparation activities towards organization of the planned project trials have been started.

Final results

For the time being, the DORA project completed the planned requirements and components specification phase and is now working on implementation of its various components. Thus, evaluation of the related progress beyond state of the art and of the expected potential impact created by the project will be performed in the next period.

Website & more info

More info: https://dora-project.eu/.