The MultiMod project aims at enhancing the mobility of citizens in urban areas by providing them, through a unique interface enabling to express their preferences, the most convenient transportation means to reach their destinations. Indeed, the increasing involvement of actors and authorities in the deployment of more responsible and cost-effective logistics and the progress made in the field of digital technology have made possible to create synergies in the creation of innovative services for improving the mobility in cities. However, users are faced with a number of solutions that coexist at different scales, providing complementary information for the mobility of users, but that make very complex to find the most convenient itinerary at a given time for a specific user. In this context, MultiMod aims at improving the mobility of citizens in urban areas by proposing contextualized services, linking users, to facilitate multimodal transport by combining, with flexibility, all available modes (planned/dynamic carpooling, public transport (PT), car-sharing, bicycle, etc.).
We consider the use of carpooling in metropolitan areas, and so for short journeys. Such usage enables itineraries that are not possible with PT, allows for opening up areas with low PT coverage by bringing users near PT (last miles), and for faster travel-time when existing PT itineraries are too complex or with too low frequency (e.g., one bus per hour). In this context, the application must help the driver and the passenger as much as possible. In particular, the application must propose the meeting-point, indicate the driver the detour duration, and indicate the passenger how to reach this meeting-point using PT. Here, the time taken by drivers and passengers to agree becomes a critical issue and so the application must provide all needed information to quickly take a decision (i.e., in one click).
In addition, the era of Smart City gathers many emerging concepts, driven by innovative technological players, which enables the exploitation of real-time data (e.g., delay of a bus, traffic jam) made available by the various actors (e.g., communities in the framework of Open Data projects, users via their mobile terminals, traffic supervision authorities). In the MultiMod project, we will use these rich sources of data to propose itineraries that are feasible at query-time. Our findings will enable the design of a mobility companion able not only to guide the user along her journey, including when and how to change of transportation mean, but also to propose itinerary changes when the current one exceeds a threshold delay. The main originality of this project is thus to address the problem of computing itineraries in large-scale networks combining PT, carpooling and real-time data, and to satisfy the preferences of users. We envision that the outcome of this project will significantly improve the daily life of citizens.
