nir-vana innovation network

A Greek start-up company is working on collecting and effectively analyzing and sharing data concerning transportation. The Greek company worked with mass transit agencies, for many years and found out, through targeted interviews that they are not sharing their transport information in an efficient and consistent way with their passengers. Additionally, they are not aware of the issues that passengers have (bus or train delays, cancelled timetables etc). Transit agencies see, in general, data management and analysis as a costly and complicated, side activity, compared to everyday operations. The company found ways to reduce the burden of this activity and help transport agencies connect with their users. The solution is data standardization. In other words, creating data in a standard format that can be analyzed and published easier and faster. The vision of the company is to bring more users into Mass Transit, improve accessibility to digital information and increase acceptance of ticket price due to better services. The company offers a comprehensive platform that provides advanced tools and services for the optimization and management of public transportation operations. The platform offers a wide range of features that help transportation organizations to streamline their operations and improve their overall performance. The platform is designed to help these organizations to maximize their efficiency and minimize their costs. From route planning and optimization to real-time monitoring, data analysis and reporting. The platform offers four distinct tools. First, a data manager that contains both static and real-time data. This tool offers a map interface for adding trips, routes, calendars, fares, stops and other related information. The inserted data comply the GTFS (a data specification that allows public transit agencies to publish their transit data in a format that can be consumed by a wide variety of software applications) and NeTEx (a CEN technical standard for exchanging public transport network, schedules, and related data) standards. Then, the platform can automate data sharing to platforms such as Google Maps. The data manager of the platform also assists users to manage the creation of data, such as notifications to the passengers, updates of delays and real time vehicle location (AVL data). Real-time data manager will be powered by a dedicated Android application that is currently under development. The second tool of the platform is the offered APIs (Application Programming Interface) that allows the user to share data with everything that is outside of the platform. For example, a user can request a list of stops, through the API tool, to be visible on the user’s website. On another example, a user can use the telematics dedicated API to retrieve real-time arrival predictions data, per stop. The analytics set of tools offered by the platform can measure the accessibility of public transport networks, using state-of-the-art metrics. This tool can be utilized as a decision support system for assessing the impact changes on the network (e.g., how will, the change of the frequency of buses on a route, impact on accessibility). In addition, the platform can estimate the usage mode of users, from a set of timestamped, geo-located data. Finally, the platform offers a tool of plugins that provides user-interfaces. The users can place them in their digital tools. An example of plugins is a journey-planning frame that can be used for allowing passengers to plan a journey, given the data that the user has uploaded or created in the platform.