Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ATTRACkTIVE (Advanced Travel Companion and Tracking Services)

Teaser

\"#Context:Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking delivering focused Research & Innovation in the Railway industry is composed of five Innovation Programmes (IPs).Under the IP4 scope “IT solutions for attractive Railway services”, ATTRACkTIVE aims to provide new concepts, tools, and...

Summary

\"#Context:
Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking delivering focused Research & Innovation in the Railway industry is composed of five Innovation Programmes (IPs).
Under the IP4 scope “IT solutions for attractive Railway services”, ATTRACkTIVE aims to provide new concepts, tools, and systems to improve the attractiveness of rail transport as part as a multimodal travel within two areas Trip Tracker (TD4.4) and the Travel Companion (TD4.5).

#Challenges:
One of the main challenges of mobility is to offer more intuitive and engaging travel experiences to customers while shielding them from the complexity and heterogeneity of services for door to door intermodal journeys. This means both the usability and customer experience needs to be strongly increased and functionalities like disruption handling, navigation, alternative management and additional user centric applications needs to be enhanced in order to foster a better modal split.

#Objectives:
ATTRACkTIVE aims to implement both the Trip Tracker and the Travel Companion. These two systems help to materialise this vision and deliver seamless door-to-door travel support encompassing both public and private transportation. This includes the mentioned functionalities as well as the required tooling and modular design to foster adoption and enable future refinements, new concepts and ideas. The solution developed in ATTRACkTIVE - which is based on the outcome of the IP4 lighthouse project IT2Rail - will guide, support, inform, and even entertain users throughout their entire itinerary.

#Detailed objectives of ATTRACkTIVE
• Collect planned and real time data for all modes including personal transport which is essential for all following up calculations and assistance
• Prognosticate and predict travel situations to find solutions for possible interruptions in advance
• Generate events that can a) be displayed on smart devices and will b) the base for subsequent processing
• Analyse personal transport events with impact for the itinerary of the traveller
• Orchestrate and distribute tracking services
• Generalise the architecture of travel applications
• Design and prototype novel forms of travel experiences and develop the required tools, such as a location-based experience editor, to simplify their prototyping and evaluation
• Guide travellers indoor and outdoor and analyse deviation from his foreseen route
• Handle the behaviour of the traveller and update his preferences accordingly, thus providing him with transport services adapted to his latest preferences and current needs

#Constraints:
• Existing systems must be kept mainly unchanged
• Achieve interoperability through minimum standardization
• Ensure market uptake with a near-zero cost
• Horizontal scalability through distributed micro-service environments

#Conclusion:
ATTRACkTIVE has shown that pan European journeys with the help of Travel Companion and Trip Tracking are much easier, more reliable and more enjoyable.\"

Work performed

\"The project started in September 2016 and finished in May 2019 after 33 months of work. The result after the finalisation of the 4th Periodic Report is to deliver the software components of the two Technical Demonstrators that the project was committed to deliver: Trip Tracker (TD4.4) and the Travel Companion (TD4.5). The main tasks performed to achieve it were:

- Defining the coordination between and collaboration with related projects, including projects funded under the Open Calls.
- Develop a user interface enabling a one stop shop for all the functionalities of the IP4 platform.
- Support a user with Navigation features
- Develop a flexible structure to react on any obstacle the might occur along a travel for all segments of a travel
- Development of a testing tool for TD4.4
- Set up an engineering design methodology to facilitate the Ecosystem design.
- Define a common modelling tool for all the interrelated projects contributing to the overall IP4 ecosystem. Team4Capalla is the chosen tool; defining a common framework for all the projects
- Dissemination and communication activities, workshops and participations in events to demonstrate the technologies develop (Including TRA 2018 and InnoTrans 2018)

#Exploitation and Dissemination
The results will be used in all S2R IP4 projects. This guarantees the demonstration of an inherently consistent system at the end of S2R initiative.
All partners agreed to further use the outcome in respect to their product portfolio and to promote the IP4 Eco-System.

ATTRACkTIVE is part of a long term initiative within the Innovation Programme 4 of Shift2Rail which is planned to be completed around 2022 with the deployment of a number of demonstrators to reach TRL 6/7. Therefore, all the results of ATTRACkTIVE will be integrated and enhanced into the IP4 Ecosystem.\"

Final results

\"ATTRACkTIVE will guide, support, inform, and even entertain users throughout their entire itinerary. A real door-to-door travel solution including all modes of transport will be developed along with new forms of traveller experiences aiming to transform the travel itself into an “ATTRACkTIVE” part of the journey.

In particular, ATTRACkTIVE implements two major systems: Trip Tracker and Travel Companion.

\"\"Trip Tracker\"\" aims to specify, design and implement a new Trip Tracking system, enabling
• Collection of planned and real time data for all modes which is essential for all following up calculations and assistance
• Prognosticate and predict travel situations to find solutions for possible future interruptions
• Orchestrate and distribute tracking services
• Generate events that can be displayed on smart devices for subsequent processing
• Analyse personal transport events and events which impact the trip of the traveller
• Inform travellers of events that affect their planned trips
• Provide alternatives if necessary

\"\"Travel Companion\"\" aims to specify, design and implement a modular platform, enabling:
• Single access for door-to-door capabilities for entire journeys
• Creating and editing novel forms of Location Based Experiences for travellers cost-effectively
• Door-to-door experiencing of the created experiences
• Indoor/outdoor positioning of travellers
• Navigation assistance
• Homogenized interface shielding the travellers from the complexity and heterogeneity of intermodal services
• Personal Virtual Space for secure storage of data related to users and their journeys (preferences, stored trips, entitlements available)

These modules contributes to the general objectives of IP4 and will be integrated into the project COHESIVE, implementing the Integrated Technological Demonstrator of IP4 (iTD4.7)\"

Website & more info

More info: http://projects.shift2rail.org/s2r_ip4_n.aspx.