News & Info
Professional article
Assisting Multimodal Travelers: Design and Prototypical Implementation of a Personal Travel Companion
Karl Rehrl
Stefan Bruntsch
Dr. Hans-J. Mentz
Increasing the share of multimodal journeys is becoming more and more urgent in our society in order to guarantee a high level of mobility in the long term. While car drivers are already assisted by advanced guidance and navigation facilities, continuous on-trip assistance for multimodal travelers is still in its infancy. Especially when it comes to situations of modal change, travelers get discouraged by the increased complexity and the lack of adequate information and guidance. Thus, the goal of our research over the past three years has been to integrate existing information systems and to design and implement the prototype of a digital personal travel companion for multimodal travelers. This paper discusses typical travel situations and possible barriers for people traveling on multimodal journeys. To address these challenges, functional requirements for a personal travel companion are derived from the analysis of the situations. The main sections of this paper describe our results focusing on personalized multimodal journey planning, mobile multimodal trip management, and smart-phone-based pedestrian orientation and guidance in complex public transport transfer buildings.
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Creating of maps directly from timetables
Voker Torlach
Stefan Engelhardt
Based on new cartographic requirements and the high acceptance of innovative GIS- and map-products the local transport authority of Stuttgart (VVS) decided to automatically generate geographical transport network maps. With the assistance of presented technique public transport maps with dynamic content and scale are created in a flexible and automatic way. Via the generation of maps directly from timetable data, loss of information is minimized which formerly occurred during the coordination process of different scopes. A large saving potential is finally possible since with the omission of external cartographers and the often involved elaborative printing technologies (e.g. silk-screen printing) costs are reduced effectively.
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Not only for the Olympic Games: Faster through Turin
Dr. Christiane Steinhoff
As part of the preparations for the Olympic Winter Games, mdv integrated a new intermodal journey planner into the existing website of the Traffic Control Company in Turin (http://www.5t.torino.it). The project included complete data integration for the public transport network as well as the incorporation of a dynamic route option search for private traffic. A particular challenge was given by the geo-coding of all public transport lines in the EFA-database and the integration of archived speed profiles into the route option search.
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Without any problem through Vienna
Heinz Heider,
Andrea Stütz;
Dr. Hans-J. Mentz, mdv Munich
In the European Year of People with Disabilities the Transport Authority of the Eastern Region (VOR) comes with its new journey planner. Important feature in this new journey planner is the consideration if the passenger can use stairs, escalators or elevators. Wheelchair users, Mothers with prams and passengers with lots of luggage can adjust the journey planner to their needs. In order to make such information available to the passenger, routes in interchange buildings has to be modelled and routes have to be calculated on the road network.
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Journey Planner for Greater London
Dr. Hans-J. Mentz (mdv)
Geralf Einert (mdv)
Jorgen Pedersen (TfL)
mdv has implemented its Intermodal Journey Planner in London. For the first time in London, a public transport information system, which includes all public transport facilities, was introduced. New functions were added, such as the presentation of frequencies. Interchange information, area maps of stops/stations and multi modal paths to or from stops are offered. The system contains about 15.000 Places of Interest (POIs) and supplies real-time Information about current traffic conditions. The Journey Planner for Greater London serves an area with about 12 Million inhabitants.
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Timetable and Vehicle Scheduling for Dual-Mode Operation
Dr.-Ing. E. h. Dipl.-Ing. Dieter Ludwig,
Dipl.-Inform. (FH) Martinin der Beek, Karlsruhe;
Dr. Hans-J. Mentz,
Dr. rer. nat. Markus Alefeld, mdv Munich
Since the first dual-mode vehicle tram was successfully put into service from Karlsruhe to Bretten eleven years ago, the network of Albtal-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft mbH (AVG) has grown a length of more than 500 km. In many aspects, the system boundaries between the tram and rail networks had to be overcome through innovative solutions. Also the planning software for timetable and vehicle scheduling had to fulfil the special demands of dual-mode vehicle operation. The planning program DIVA from Mentz Datenverarbeitung (mdv) was expanded to include exact traction vehicle scheduling and buffered trip time calculation. This resulted in a system, which takes the needs of two-systems operation into account from planning to AVL supply.
