On 12th September 2024 | from 11 a.m. to 12 a.m.
Travelling by public transport across borders is not always easy. In most cases, the travel information for the entire route is not combined in a single service and is therefore not easily accessible at a glance. Instead, planning a cross-border trip requires several apps from different service providers for the country or region you are travelling through. This inconvenience may lead travellers foregoing the journey or choosing a less environmentally friendly mode of transport such as the car or plane.
Adressing this problem and encouraging a shift from individual motorized transport to low-carbon mobility options such as public transport was the main objective of the LinkingAlps project. We developed a technical solution to improve the access to climate-friendly mobility options and provide seamless, cross-border information through already existing end-user services for tourists and for local citizens, especially daily commuters, to change their mobility patterns. This was done by applying the concept of Linking of Services and using the OJP Standard (Open API for Distributed Journey Planning). It enables connecting different travel information providers in a decentralised manner and only exchanging and combining routing results instead of exchanging actual data.
This was done by applying the concept of linking services and using the OJP standard (Open API for Distributed Journey Planning). It makes it possible to connect different providers of travel information in a decentralised manner and only exchange and combine routing results instead of exchanging actual data.
Petra Soderqvist from the European Commission and Nicole Hampel from AustriaTech, will give you insights into multimodal travel information services (MMTIS) as well on the project itself. The meet-up will also focus on how our LinkingAlps service works from a technical point of view and which challenges we will have to overcome in the future.
1. Solutions
International trips with OJP (via demo App): Luka Krevs, CEO at Realis, will present how international trips work within the app SiMO (www.simo.si). Beyond that he will also illustrate the challenges of collecting international timetables for buses and trains and integrating them seamlessly into a route planner.
Demo of the active systems: Andreas Glauser, Business Analyst at SKI+, will give an insight into how to use the open source demonstration application to find trips with the active LinkingAlps OJP system for all 3 routing cases (within the country, in the neighbouring country and in distant countries).
Multi languages: Roberto Cavaliere, Subject Matter Expert for AI and mobility solutions at NOI, will provide a detailed overview about how multilinguism aspects are taken into account in the entire distributed journey planning system, with a deepening about how this topic is handled in the OJP interface.
Exchange points: Serena Barassi, IT consultant at ARIA, will give an overview of the importance, definition and management of exchange points and the upcoming challenges within the Linking Alps project.
2. Challenges:
Stefan Mayr, Managing Director of VAO, will show how combining existing and well-established (federal and national) routing services could be the best way to ensure quality and reliability for all end-users looking for cross-border information.
3. Discussion
The project brings together 14 partners from six Alpine region countries who are committed to the joint
challenge. Within the framework of LinkingAlps, the providers of
travel information services are obliged to provide their data via an application programming interface (API).
Programming Interface, API) so that the end-user services can be made available to the
cross-border route planning can be established.
The project began on 1st October 2019.
Andreas Glauser is an engineer for electro- and communication technology with a MAS in business/IT consulting and is responsible for the further development of our router, the OJP, at SKI+. He has been working with distributed IT systems such as IoT and other specific networks of various protocol types for 20 years.
Serena is an environmental engineer and collaborates with ARIA in the field of mobility and transport. She is project manager for “Muoversi in Lombardia" and other initiatives relating to the sharing of public transport data in the Lombardy Region.
Roberto works at NOI Techpark and is responsible to support the implementation of different R&D&I initiatives in the field of smart mobility and intelligent transportation systems.
Luka is a CEO at REALIS (www.realis.si) with more than 25 years of experience in IT and is supporting Slovenian (www.nap.si) and Croatian (www.promet-info.hr) NAP's in different international projects with emphasis on exchanging traffic data using DATEXII and multimodal project using OJP, NeTEx and SIRI. He is also a member of steering board and Products and Innovation Committee chair at TISA (www.tisa.org).
Nicole Hampel works at AustriaTech in the field of Digital Mobility Services, especially in the topics “travel information services” and “Linking of Services”. In the past, she was project manager of the Interreg projects LinkingAlps and OJP4Danube.
Stefan Mayr has been a member of the management of the Mobility Association Austria since its foundation in 2012, and since 2015 he has also been the Managing Director of the Mobilty Information Austria VAO (Verkehrsauskunft Österreich VAO GmbH). As the Chief Strategy Officer, he represents the Mobility Association Austria in project committees and consortia such as ITS Austria and thereby ensures ongoing innovation development of the company.
Stefan Mayr has many years of experience in the field of public transport and passenger information and was significantly involved in the establishment and development of the organisation as Managing Director of the Mobility Association Austria until 2019 and in his current positions.
Petra Soderqvist is a Policy Officer at the European Commission, Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE). She is working in the B4 Unit, in the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) team. She worked on the revision of the Delegated Regulation on multimodal travel information services (MMTIS), which was adopted and entered into force earlier in 2024.