A report from the OPTICITIES study visit and tutorial session in Madrid
On 27 and 28 April, CRTM (Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid) and UPM (Technical University of Madrid) hosted one of the five OPTICITIES study tours and tutorial sessions to demonstrate the advanced Intelligent Transport Systems they have developed to provide high quality multimodal information and coordination services to the public transport operators and passengers in Madrid and the wider regional area.
Around 30 participants including urban practitioners and experts from the local and European ITS community had the opportunity to see live demonstrations of CRTM’s communication and decision support tools. The programme also included presentations from OPTICITIES partners Gothenburg and CSI Piemonte on map based applications and an introduction from Hacon on the common interface that is used to develop the OPTICITIES multimodal urban navigator.
Gothenburg presented its advanced online road works management tool NYSTART 2.0, which is used to approve, monitor and communicate road works. Detailed information on the different construction sites is included by the contractors, in the future it will also be possible for citizens, local businesses and freight operators to add and use data. CSI Piemonte developed an open source map of the transport network in Turin, which uses data from various transport services and online portals to monitor and analyse the accessibility, network performance and intermodal transfer points ofthe metropolitan area.
By including additional indicators, for example on infrastructure for cycling and walking, the map can also be used to measure the overall impact of Turin’s sustainable urban mobility plan. Hacon, a German company that is renowned for its travel information services, presented the architecture it developed within the framework of OPTICITIES to create multimodal urban navigators for Grand Lyon and Gothenburg. Both apps are based on a common interface and standardized open data sources, allowing for multiple language use and the creation of new modular functionalities and city-specific adaptations.
The live demonstrations took place at CRTM’s public transport management centre, which provides real-time information to the public transport operators (more than 40 in the whole region), customers and emergency services on the performance of the network.
The open architecture of the ITS system also allows to process data from other sources, such as public bicycle and air quality monitoring stations. One of its key functionalities is to automatically generate alerts in case of delays and incidents. These alerts are checked and analysed, run through a decision and orchestration engine and fed into an information distribution module which simultaneously notifies the operators and customers through a variety of online communication channels and electronic message boards.
Within the framework of OPTICITIES CRTM also used the data from the transport network to develop an advanced journey planner called ‘MiTrasporte’, which was tested with a user group of 150 persons. The first results already indicate that – by providing more precise and personalised travel information with high tech features – including for example augmented reality technology for easy wayfinding – encourage people to use public transport more often and for different travel purposes instead of only commuting.
The presentations from the study visit and tutorial session will be uploaded on the stakeholder forum of the OPTICITIES website.
Project partners are currently producing detailed Deployment Guidelines for each of the ITS applications, which will be published by the end of October2016.
The next OPTICITIES tutorial sessions, study visits and events are organized in Eindhoven (24 May 2016, Smart Cities EIP General Assembly), Glasgow (7-8 June 2016, ITS Europe Conference), Birmingham (13 July 2016, study visit), Grand Lyon (27-28 September 2016, Final Conference), Tampere (17-19 October 2016 , joint EUROCITIES Mobility and Knowledge Society Forum) and Gothenburg (27 October 2016, study visit). For more information, contact Peter Staelens.
