ENHANCED WISETRIP - Enhancing Intermodality of Content, Personalised Information and Functionality of WISETRIP Network of Journey Planning Engines
Overview
Background & policy context:
An attempt to integrate Journey Planning engines to form a unified intermodal planner for international journeys, has been performed by the WISETRIP FP7 project. WISETRIP has addressed important needs of the international traveller including the provision of personalized information before and during the trip, under different usage scenarios.
Objectives:
An attempt to integrate journey planning engines to form a unified intermodal planner for international journeys has been performed by the WISETRIP4 FP7 research project. WISETRIP has addressed important needs of the international traveller including the provision of personalised information before and during the trip, under different usage scenarios. To this end, the project developed and validated an innovative service platform that provides and personalises multi-modal travel information sourced from connected variant journey planners and is accessible by travellers through various mobile or fixed devices before and during the journey. The main demonstrator of the project results is the WISETRIP web interface, currently available under http://www.wisetrip.travel,able to get requests and provide multimodal trip answers, for a limited number of international and national routes (Greece, Finland, United Kingdom, Italy and China).
The ENHANCED WISETRIP project built on the objectives and on the knowledge developed in the first WISETRIP project to bring new possibilities for planning, booking and travelling multimodal journeys adapted to all user needs, multiple trip criteria, environmental impact and personal preferences. To manage unexpected scenarios, the project planned to realize integration of real-time and non-real-time data sources based upon efficient communications and decision management mechanism that would be considered for traveller alerting and trip redesign. It also aimed to advance the state-of-the-art towards efficient and green planning of multimodal international trips, through its unique mixture of features, which were the:
(a) inclusion of a wide grid of criteria that form the basis of variant trip strategies and govern selection process either at planning or at trip redesign phase. Criteria include CO2 footprint, elderly and disabled preferences, typical factors (time, cost, hops) and various user-specific options;
(b) acknowledging user requirements by genuinely addressing door-to-door journey planning; considering real-time event data and information on extraordinary conditions (strikes, disasters, extreme weather); and offering the possibility of integrated ticketing;
(c) use of the most advanced mobile interfaces;
(d) expansion of the geographical coverage and of the number of transport modes supported by the existing open platform for the interconnection of journey planners; including
Methodology:
The ENHANCED WISETRIP project had a duration of 30 months. The strategy of the project implementation was mainly based upon augmenting and strengthening the content and functionality of the existing network of cooperating journey planners and their core functional engine, namely the WISETRIP platform. Therefore, the project's technical approach included the determination and implementation of an expansion plan which would deliver add-on modules and algorithmic adaptations on the WISETRIP platform, so that to fulfil the envisaged enhancements. The work plan involved: gap analysis, integration of additional transport modes and journey planners, algorithmic design and implementation, advancing of interface, and finally demonstration, validation, assessment, dissemination and exploitation.
WP2: Gap analysis and design approach
The workplan's initial aim was to record the various gaps as far as concerns the operating behaviour, performance and functional completeness of WISETRIP. Based on these findings a clear decision ('go / no-go') was taken on the lines of design and development including the ways:
(a) to calculate and adopt the CO2 footprint parameter within the trip decision making process;
(b) integrate real-time data within the multi-criteria routing algorithms; and
(c) to decide which the trip strategies will be in terms of additional user parameters and how they will be visualised to the user at the query definition process.
WP3: Integrating different transport systems into the core network of journey planners
Aimed to partly fill the gap of the international route content through the integration of international transport systems into the existing network of journey planners and distribution systems. Moreover, integrating journey planners with cycle, private car route information in the system would provide the option to combine cycle or car with public transport modes, thus, enhancing the trip alternatives offered. The core planning algorithm of WISETRIP and data framework was to be improved to accommodate additional modes.
WP4: Itinerary planning algorithmic and data management advancements
This part of the work worked with the design and implementation of additional functions and adjusting them to the existing grid of WISETRIP functions. Therefore, the real-time decision mechanism of WISETRIP was adapted accordingly and new multi-criteria algorithms for static and dynamic itinerary planning was implemented. The
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