Intelligent networking for more shared mobility

On the road together

Intelligent networking for more shared mobility

There are many environmentally-friendly ways of getting around. Take the bus to the station, hop on the train there and cycle the last bit to your destination on a rented e-bike. Or scoot to a car-sharing station with an e-scooter and take a car from there. All of this is feasible, but the planning and booking process has been far too cumbersome and unreliable up to now. Two research projects at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg are seeking solutions to these problems. The project “Open Mobility Infrastructure” (OMI) starts at the local level. It aims to help expand shared mobility services in the Rhein-Sieg district and consolidate them in a user-friendly app. The developers are primarily focusing on rural areas because the availability of such services has been too limited there up to now. This problem could be solved by additionally relying on companies, associations or private individuals who would like to carpool or make vehicles available for shared use. But they still lack the technical infrastructure needed to present these offers in a network.

Good solutions for urban and rural areas

For this reason, OMI is setting up a self-service website where all stakeholders can post their sharing or carpooling options. Citizens can access it via an electronic mobility assistant on their smartphone, for instance. “The goal in the final stage of the project is for the mobile phone to become a digital vehicle key,” explains Alexander Boden, Professor of Software Engineering at H-BRS.

The complex project requires the cooperation of many partners. Scientists at the university contribute their experience in machine learning (a subfield of artificial intelligence). The University of Siegen conducts user research in the field, and the start-ups Reboot Mobility and open.INC bring their development expertise to the project. Cooperatives, such as Vianova.Coop and Car&RideSharing Overath, contribute their practical experience of shared mobility in rural regions. The cities of Sankt Augustin, Hennef and Troisdorf support the project as model regions, and last but not least,

the Provinzial insurance company handles insurance issues for carefree, networked mobility.

While rural areas lack shared mobility, big cities have to cope with completely different challenges. The wide range of options sometimes leads to chaos and annoyance. “Just parking bicycles or scooter in cities is not enough,” says Alexander Boden. “The myriad of sharing options must be meaningfully integrated into the local mobility infrastructure and aligned with local needs.” The project “Mobility Intelligence as a Service – Development of a European Open Source Platform for Decision Making with Mobility Data” (MIAAS) is addressing this task.

Better overview, more control

H-BRS is working as project leader together with the University of Cologne, the Cologne public transport company, the Bonn public utility company and two technology companies highQ IT-Solutions and SI-Automation. The joint goal is to collect the mobility data of existing services and process it with the help of corresponding infrastructure and interfaces so that better planning is possible. The researchers at H-BRS use artificial intelligence (AI) for this purpose. It recognises patterns in the collected data, such as the parking points of e-scooters. Based on this information, it predicts the future demand for vehicles. Another task of the scientists is preparing the data in a user-friendly way. A dashboard, i.e. an overview page, helps to visualise information about preferred times of use and rough movement patterns of e-scooters or rental bikes. On the one hand, this allows planners to coordinate shared mobility with public transport better. On the other hand, the dashboard facilitates better regulation, such as in the case of oversupply or undesirable parking on pedestrian paths. The software developed for this purpose, including a guide, will be made available at the end of the project as an open-source project for all interested parties, such as urban transport planners, mobility managers, transport operators and commercial providers of rental vehicles.

More on SUPRA: www.interaktive-technologien.de/projekte/omi www.projekt-omi.de https://miaas.de