Advanced Travel Companion and Tracking Services

Mankind’s carbon footprint is the underlying cause of global warming. Reducing it drastically within the next few years is imperative and favouring public transportation will be a deciding factor in this race. New technologies have the potential to enable the creation of better public transportation systems, thus enticing citizens away from using private means. Today’s travellers indeed consider public transportation as a source of difficulties and a cumbersome way to travel. When riders choose their journeys, they are often left to fend for themselves. They have to figure out transfers between multimodal forms of travel and how to handle disruptions and re-plan their route, when not left stranded. In addition, the current variety and heterogeneity of services along multimodal journeys is another serious source of complication and frustration. Increasing the attractiveness of rail transport requires a novel and integrated solution that will be developed in the IP4 part of the Shift2Rail project. It will guide, support, inform, and even entertain users throughout their entire itinerary, adapting to unforeseeable interruptions and events in order to propose alternative routes, including in the first and last miles. A real door-to-door travel solution including all modes of transport will be developed along with new forms of traveller experiences aiming to transform the travel itself into an “ATTRACkTIVE” part of the journey. This proposal aims to implement both the Shift2Rail Trip Tracker (TD4.4) and Travel Companion (TD4.5), two major components to materialise this vision and deliver seamless door-to-door travel support encompassing both public and private transportation portions of a journey. This includes disruption handling, navigation and user centric ubiquitous applications as well as the required tooling and modular design to foster adoption and enable future refinements, new concepts and ideas.