Hacking mobility with Denso
We recently took part in an 🏭Industryhack event where in co-operation with Denso we were going to start a Mobility Revolution — a safe and sustainable revolution in crafting future mobility.
The Challenge was framed around finding solutions, user experiences and innovations to be used to serve the urban citizen to conveniently get from A to B. We approached this from a MaaS perspective with the the working title “How to make multi-modal mobility approachable to the masses”. With multi-modal mobility we describe mobility systems where the journey is done using several different methods of travel, e.g. a combination of public transport + city bikes + rental cars. Our solution was one of the two that peaked interest on the jury’s table, so we thought it would be interesting to share our thought process with you.
Our view of the problem at hand saw several small issues that combined create the wall that is hurting wider adoption of MaaS. Firstly, the providers sit in separate silos, which hurts both discoverability, as the users don’t know about all the options that they would have, and also makes it harder to plan truly multi-modal routes. Secondarily, MaaS in itself doesn’t currently add enough value without a guaranteed service level, which is impossible to give as the current solutions don’t follow up on service level fulfilment.
Our solution to this was to create a platform built on top of the open source suite OpenTripPlanner where we would integrate all the available providers that we could get an API access to. The platform could then provide weighted true multi-modal routes using all the available modes, including but not limited to public transport (HSL), Uber, Citi Bikes and car share vehicles.
Another new possibility our solution provides is be real-time opportunistic routing. This means that the customer could get notifications and suggestions to change their route after the journey has begun, in the same way that a car navigator notifies the driver when missing a turn. This could be triggered by a change in traffic, new available routes or changes in weather to give a few examples. This would lay the foundation to operators to provide value added services to the end users, creating better total value and a compelling reason for the users to take use of the platform.
The platform would track each individual user on their journey, and if an clearly superior route would become available, for example a car share vehicle would be parked right next to our user, the system would alert the user and show the alternative better route.
Our demo showcased the use of these integrations and tracking of a single user with real time public transport data combined with a virtual car sharing service. The PoC showed that this was clearly possible from a technological standpoint, but still left many business decisions outside of the scope. After all, there’s only so much you can get done during a scope of 48h
If this got you interested we highly recommend and take a look at the other awesome things we’ve done, or contact us so that we can get together and create something amazing.
