On 28 October 2011 the Instant Mobility project held a workshop in Brussels Belgium to present its innovative future scenarios and use cases to an audience of key stakeholders. The workshop mainly addressed cities and regions interested in exploring the potential of future internet technologies for solving their mobility and transport issues.
Instant Mobility is a 2-year research project in the first phase of the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) and aims to build a platform to host innovative future internet-based services to optimise travellers’ mobility goods transport and traffic management.
To this end Instant Mobility has described and is analysing a set of scenarios and services corresponding to the needs of five key stakeholder groups:
- multimodal travellers
- car drivers and passengers
- public and other collective transport operators
- truck fleet operators and the distribution industry
- road operators and traffic managers
The workshop brought together over 35 participants including representatives of the cities of Rome Toledo Istanbul Trondheim and the Basque Region.
The workshop’s objectives were:
- to explore the concerns and aims of the cities and other participants and how Internet-based solutions could help in solving them
- to validate the Instant Mobility scenarios understand what was missing or needed modifying
- to start a dialogue with potential candidate cities to host a pilot implementation of Instant Mobility applications in the second phase of the FI PPP programme from mid-2013
Their main challenges identified by city participants were congestion (and its environmental consequences) and the need to shift the balance from individual to collective transport modes. Efficient and sustainable management of goods distribution and commercial vehicles in cities and the lack of reliable online information across transportation modes were also a concern.
Internet technology could influence people to choose greener means of travel and transport through multimodal real-time and personalised information and also online ticketing. Moreover the internet could help in collecting data from travellers and vehicle movements and making real-time information accessible online. This would help travellers improve overall traffic management and reduce environmental impact.
In conclusion Instant Mobility technologies and services could support a better collaboration between public and private mobility actors in a city. The project contributes to making mobility information more complete reliable transparent and available for users and shows how future internet technologies can help to integrate existing services to create next-generation mobility for all.
The next Instant Mobility workshop for transport and mobility stakeholders will be held in February 2012 (date and place to be confirmed). The purpose will be to identify the requirements of potential users for the future internet-enabled transport and mobility applications to be developed in the project as well as to identify cities’ interests to be a pilot trial site in the FI-PPP phase 2 where they would host demonstrations of the Instant Mobility applications in the areas of traveller assistance smart city logistics and virtual traffic management and control.
For more information please visit Instant Mobility website or contact Paul Kompfner.
Link to original Article
http://www.ertico.com/instant-mobility-workshop-unveils-future-internet-impact-on-mobility/
Original Publication Date: Wed 16 Nov 2011
