Cloud-based mobility services for European cities

Since it reached mainstream around 2006, cloud computing has widely been acknowledged as the future of ICT. The possibilities seem endless, and researchers are coming up with new ideas and concepts at a head-spinning pace. Forget about 'simple' online storage capacity: the future of the cloud is all about real time services and applications, a trend reinforced by the increasing market share of smartphones.

MOVEUS is one of the latest FP7-funded projects riding this new wave. It kicked off in October 2013 with ambitions to design, implement, test and exploit an integrated cloud-computing technology. This has the potential to radically change European citizens' mobility habits in cities.

'We want to offer intelligent and personalised travel information services, helping people to decide the best transport choice and providing meaningful feedback on the energy efficiency savings obtained as a result', the project team explains. And since, in 2013, best also means 'most sustainable', recommendations supported by incentives will be provided to foster 'soft' mobility modes such as walking and biking, the use of car/bike sharing and public transport.

In a nutshell, the MOVEUS technology will collect information from a wide variety of transport modes such as public buses, car/bike sharing systems, traffic management systems, vehicles equipped with traffic density measurement technology and users' smartphones. This data will then be processed and analysed by an innovative and high-capacity computing platform, which will measure 'the pulse of urban mobility' from a global perspective, obtain valuable information on how the traffic density evolve and calculate how individual users can travel in a more eco-friendly way.

The MOVEUS consortium, which is made of eleven partners from four countries (Italy, Finland, Spain and the UK), will provide not only the cloud-based mobility management platform, but also an API toolkit granting data access to developers, innovative user-centric services based on incentives, fully integrated smart mobility applications running on users' smartphones (mobility assistant) and at control centres (mobility management) and, finally energy efficiency assessment tools to measure users' performance.

The technology will be tested in Madrid, Tampere and Genoa until September 2016. City councils, transport/mobility operators, citizens and local technology partners will all be participating in the experience, which makes MOVEUS a cornerstone in the advent of a smarter, more sustainable society where each individual can actively participate.