Project

In public transport, many passengers travel to different destinations every day – both in urban and rural areas. In order to develop public transport to a mobility experience, the SmartMMI project focuses on improving the information provision of passengers along their mobility chain. Both in the event of a breakdown, plan changes, tourist destinations or service availability along the route, passengers would like to be informed appropriately. In the SmartMMI project, funded by the mFund research initiative of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, five project partners from industry and research are developing new technologies from data acquisition and data integration to the visualization of the data. The project will focus on researching and testing context sensitive data provision of mobility data on specially designed intelligent transparent display panels. These displays can be installed in public transport vehicles and at stops, in conjunction with applications on passengers’ mobile devices.

The project partners are developing new technologies for capturing and integrating different data from a variety of data sources. The consortium relies on the use of big data, smart data technologies and the integration of specific public transport data based on the latest standards with open data and third-party data. The data is semantically upgraded to enable intelligent integration and selection of the relevant data. This is also served by context information describing the current situation of the passengers and allowing the system to select data tailored to the situation and preparing it in accordance with the needs of the user and the situation. For example, sensitive data is displayed on the user’s smartphone in suitable format, while general supplementary information is displayed on the transparent SmartWindow of the vehicle using the larger area for more details. Discretely used colour concepts can then be used, for example, to establish for a passenger the connection between his or her personal route and the more general information about the route.

The project develops semantic connectors that optimally link public transport data with other data relevant to the travel chain. Prototypes of an ambitious intelligent travel information system are researched and developed supporting passengers during their travel in public transport in every situation in the best possible way. Thus can significantly increase the attractiveness of public transport as an ecological, timesaving and useful alternative to automobile traffic.