Public authorities support for a Large Scale Data Infrastructure for ...

22nd ITS World Congress, Bordeaux, France, 5–9 October 2015

Paper number ITS-2141

Public authorities support for a Large Scale Data Infrastructure for Mobility (LaSDIM) Alain DUPERET1*, Christophe DAMAS2, Gérard SCEMAMA3 1. IGN, France, 6-8 avenue Blaise Pascal, Cité Descartes, Champs-sur-Marne, 77455 Marne-la-Vallée Cedex 2, France, +33 1 64 15 31 49, [email protected] 2. Cerema, France 3. Ifsttar, France

Abstract An increasing amount of data available in different localization references is a barrier to future development of the transport community. The aim of the project LASDIM is to create a totally open environment that enables to explore, visualize, disseminate or re-use data in a common geo-localization reference. This will require specifying and building a new data model, authoritative reference and attractive for the data or service providers. The Claire-SITI platform will be used as an intelligent and multimodal system able to manage both the public transport and the road transport. The project will allow for global brainstorming on fast and real-time exchange of information with the aim of reducing the negative impact of transport. This will be a brand-new feature encouraging positive behavior changes in and allow lower traffic congestion, reduce pollution levels and optimize emergency-response time. Keywords: Data infrastructure, mobility, referenced geo-localisation 1) The geographical dimension within the mobility context An increasing amount of data available in different localization references is clearly a barrier to future development of innovative services of the transport community. To overcome this obstacle, the actors involved acknowledge that in order to host the existing or new innovative services and research, in an open and interoperable environment, there is a need to enlarge the capacity to receive them. Nowadays, the data are localized in unlinked systems (including localization by addresses or

Public authorities support for a Large Scale Data Infrastructure for Mobility (LaSDIM )

names). It is rarely qualified in terms of quality or content, and does not use cross-controls between different sources of information. They do not often re-use or rely on the pre-existing data. This generates redundant information, requires useless effort to capture data and leads to uneasily detectable errors. What is worse, it results in a lack of exhaustiveness or causes misunderstanding of the available data. Scattering various data sets between numerous operators and the general lack of standards in operating it, especially with regard to geography and mobility may lead to various misfits. This hampers the development of the new generation of very promising applications from the mobility community. Besides, geographical databases provide a first-level description of communication networks such as roads, railroads, rivers, and bicycle paths. Connections between these networks are often not included in data models. In order to allow for general mobility modelling procedure, it is necessary to identify those new objects, to adapt them to the current information systems and to establish new innovative data capture procedures. It is also necessary to attach and generalize referenced and authoritative 3D elevation information to the objects. To create a favourable context to better understand global mobility in a modern society gathering and connecting all the existing specific data and hosting services for citizens and professionals, in a similar environment, is a challenge. This requires the creation a reference Spatial (or geographic) Data Infrastructure (SDI), dedicated to mobility. A SDI is a global organization that relies on sharing agreements, coordination between its members and their computer systems, on and off-line catalogues, servers, software, data, applications, web pages etc. The first step is initiating a project entitled “Large Scale Data Infrastructure for Mobility” (LaSDIM), a SDI designed for Mobility that integrates, supports and maintains a large range of data (roads, railroads, transport infrastructures, satellite images and data, various kinds of objects and services (simulation, assistance, real time dissemination…). In the so-called LaSDIM, the prefix Large refers to “large cartographic” scales as much as to “large territories covered”. LaSDIM as a SDI includes a data model, a set of services and a portal that will be described below Large variety of data and representation Presently, multiple choices are available and coexist: - Maps: National mapping agencies, Open Street Map, Mapbox, Google, Mapquest… - Road network types: high speed urban, urban, semi-urban… - Public transportation modes: bus, tramway, subway or by lines (SIG, TRIDENT, GTFS).

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Claire-SITI Toulouse multimodal dynamic web map When about road network, traffic needs state monitoring, flow, rate, speed, event DATEX (jam or accident warning) as for public transportation it also deals with theoretical and planned schedules, relative gap between both intervals (headway), headway variation… Potential actors concerned Uniting all stakeholders concerned according to the problem of mobility guarantees the success of the project. It is a joint venture from entities dealing either with geography or with mobility. Their identification, by type of entity is given below, with special focus on their main topics of research. The National Mapping Agencies (NMA) has a high capacity to maintain large geographical data sets in describing their national territories and public authorities in charge of public missions for mobility and transportation. They are naturally appointed to collect and gather data from all public authorities and are involved in crowdsourcing. The network descriptions in NMA’s databases will be used as a starting point to enrich a description by specific valuable mobility information. The territorial communities are, in their specific national contexts, most of the time directly asked to organize the services to be provided to the citizens, especially those related to mobility, transport and environmental protection. The political commitment which they support and the direct evaluation of their activities by the citizens guarantee the quality of the service provided and its adequacy to the needs of the general public. This usually covers applying public policies to managing road networks and transport organisation, now extended to environmental issues. Private transnational operators and research laboratories are the inevitable actors who guarantee favourable conditions for progress which leads to fast integration of both research 3


results and most recent technological breakthroughs. 2) The Large Scale Data Infrastructure for Mobility (LaSDIM) project The Aim of LaSDIM Creating a totally open environment that enables the user to explore, visualize, disseminate or re-use data in a common geo-localization reference opens the way to sustainable exploitation, in a seamless cross-border fashion. This structure will enable the development of unified platforms for customer information, online booking with payment and ticketing services, covering all means of transport in all the countries involved. Operators who handle information for roads (including walking, cycling) but as well as railroads will be connected as they move in the LaSDIM environment. In the context of calling for new ideas on Mobility, the project tackles other topics apart from those on Infrastructure, rail, road and urban mobility. Road transportation is the common ground covered by such an infrastructure. And the final goal of the project is to link it to other means of transportation. This justifies the presence of national actors such as Ifsttar, Cerema and IGN who refer to entire countries and results in the following benefits: - enriching the national data bases and rendering them authoritative; -

minimizing the energy spent locally to handle those data; creating a common, shared environment that is accessible and usable by the stakeholders and the public at large.

Building LaSDIM data model This covers the design and the creation of the LaSDIM data model, based on the NMA legitimacy to pilot the design process, initial set up and maintenance. Thanks to its updates by innovative and adapted procedures, it has been designed to become an authoritative reference, attractive for their data or service providers. The NMA should promote the design of the LaSDIM data model and will support the set-up partnerships of service operators while contributing to build national databases on the basis of the LaSDIM data model. Data will be completed where necessary by pilot territories in order to host the services resulting from the LaSDIM project. Operators using LaSDIM will therefore undergo a return on investment with optimized applications, the improvement of existing ones and the ease to develop and market new ones from latest research and innovation. Basic work will be managed by the NMA in order to make the LaSDIM data model consistent throughout the EU and make it compatible with the INSPIRE directive, the standards and interoperability that are currently used in the field of localization. The districts and service operators who are willing will contribute their expertise to enriching the model, upgrading it with the objective of supporting ITS services. They will 4


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carry out a study of the existing situation among LaSDIM members aiming to identify the issues related to available data (model, semantic content, localization mode by GPS or address or Specific points), data exchange format, norms, services to be implemented. Later on every opportunity of merging roads as a means of mobility with other transportation networks will be sought.

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specify the target data models for LaSDIM and the work to be done in order to guarantee sustainable implementation of interoperability within the partnerships by identifying: - the relevant elements that will comprise the final LaSDIM infrastructures: data models, associated exchange formats, identify the necessary additional data acquisition with respect to existing data so that the LaSDIM system becomes operational for the services forecast by the partners of the project; - relevant data format to implement (CityGML, BIM), list of formats currently used; - interoperability mechanisms (services, links such as URI), standardized or

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normalized, whatever type they may be (data or services – NETEX, INSPIRE); - target systems (definition of their scope according to the pre-defined priority of needs). Complete the relevant operations: development linked to exchange formats, identifications of the elements of existing norms that need to be completed, integration of all the existing data derived from project partners.

State of the art in data location methods Locations on the road network, such as intersections, highway segments, or a chain (or fraction) of urban streets, is a key issue. The international standard ISO 17572 specifies two different location referencing methods (LRM): - Pre-coded Location References (Pre-coded Profile); - Dynamic Location References (Dynamic Profile). Alert-C (Advice and problem Location for European Road Traffic) uses pre-coded Location References. So far this day, INSPIRE directive only include Pre-coded location referencing methods. Two well-known dynamic methods have been developed: - AGORA-C which has been iso-labelled as 17572-3, but patented by Via Licensing; - OpenLR, royalties’ free and proprietary of TomTom. These methods are designed to support machine-to-machine location descriptions. They were originally developed for referencing traffic information to a digital road network, with constrain of limiting the amount of location descriptive data due to bandwidth. The TPEG (Transport Protocol Experts Group) Automotive Profile (TAP) incorporates the transfer of AGORA-C locations. This method allows to determine a standardized location description on demand (on-the-fly) for the spatial footprint of a traffic message or safety alert to be transmitted to road users. 5


Within both of these methods, when a sender wants to provide located-data to a receiver the following process is used. The sender encodes the location according to the local digital map to an agreed format and passes it to the receiver who decodes the information and applies the location to the local map at the receiver side. Ideally, this works even if there are differences in the maps. A more recent approach shall also be taken into account: TPEG-ULR, (TPE - Universal Location Referencing) based on Markov chain algorithm for identifying individual road segments between two slightly different map. The two main advantages of dynamic-LRM are flexibly and the ability to overcome map differences. But they are less reliable than Pre-coded LRM. Recent Urban TS-experimentation in France shows that about 90% of location information can transferred machine to machine, but 10% still requires human reading. This finally leads to add a matching table in the decoding process. Rosette European project demonstrates pre-coded LRM are the most reliable and easy to implement but suffer a lack of flexibility and easiness to be extended. On the contrary dynamic LRM are more flexible but suffer a lack of reliability that has been confirmed on recent experimentation in France as said before. LaSDIM has clearly identified this problem, and more work has to be done to address this issue. The creation and development of LaSDIM and accepting it as a standard will lead to a change in the regulatory framework, and the norms for transportation data will have to be adapted while keeping the INSPIRE standard as a guiding principle. For the sake of NMA and pilot territories, user commitment will be stimulated by setting up collaborative data capture procedures. Other existing data related to user mobility held by other actors will be integrated into LaSDIM, through procedures of trusted community sourcing. In addition, dedicated mechanisms of crowdsourcing based on data collection from end-user citizens will be established. 3) The recourse to the intelligent multimodal Claire-SITI platform The LaSDIM project will use the Claire-SITI platform in order to coordinate the various services identified (see paragraph below). Claire-SITI is an intelligent and multimodal system able to manage both the Public Transport (PT) (bus, tram, metro, railways) and the Road Transport (RT) in an integrated approach. In order to solve the key issue for data integration, Claire-SITI proposes a common integrated model in order to reach a data harmonisation. The approach consists in the use of a generic data model between data providers and service providers which is the way to design a comprehensive interoperability framework for defining interconnected services. This Claire-SITI generic model is a multi-scale model which manages different levels of abstraction and of interrelation of transport networks. It is also multi-criteria able to associate any type of indicator for example on punctuality, regularity, reliability, fluidity, availability, 6


sustainability, relationships between the various entities that are modelised such as nodes/supernodes (stops, intersections, interchanges), links/superlinks (road sections between junctions, PT link between stops), PT lines, road axes, route path), resources (vehicles, drivers), travel units (traveller, freight). It is then possible to represent the trips of these various entities within the multimodal network. Claire-SITI takes in consideration previous work already done in the transport field such as TRANSMODEL, TRIDENT, SIRI, IFOPT, DATEX, INSPIRE, but also more advanced results from research and development conducted by the IFSTTAR-GRETTIA department which has identified fundamental items to be developed: All information is set up in a unique model: this ensures consistency (only one source for all applications/services); - The model manages independently a physical and logical representation. More precisely, the logical view is based on mathematical hierarchized graphs: useful to manage level of details of networks, to aggregate several types of data from possibly -

different sources; The interaction between various transport systems are represented with the modelling of a reference network based on geographical data. The model is also open: new transport modes and types of data (indicators, events) can

be added using generic labels, new data can be derived and added. The Claire-SITI platform is also a service that covers also a set of standard on and off line functions: monitoring, diagnosis, decision support, spatio-temporal warehousing, simulation, visualization, distribution. 4) Potential new ITS applications The LaSDIM project will at its outset allow for global brainstorming on fast and real-time exchange of information to produce guiding principles with the aim of reducing the negative impact of transport, while satisfying and fostering the increasing needs of mobility of goods and citizens. Indeed, the intended new ITS applications that will be coordinated around Claire will involve: - Dynamic regulation of urban transports : In order to get rid of « all-cars » in city centres, and to avoid congestion at access points to large cities, while improving public urban and suburban transport services is a major stake. The demand for transport calls for a door-to-door service which has not been achieved for passengers yet. Creating parking lots on the outskirts of cities, allowing to park close to a railway or bus station aims to provide this service. Data collection, data processing and data distribution should be integrated into the LaSDIM database. Furthermore, there is an increasing demand for proximity transportation with low traffic flow, due to the ageing population in Europe. There is a trend of individual public transport and making vehicles with driver-assistance available to users limited to a geographical area. 7


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Management of events, crisis or hazard management

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Assistance service for the public: Development of services of assistance to tourists and travellers (hotels, points of interest, shops…), services using event data from assistance applications (eCall, geolocalized assistance) whose innovation consists in fostering interoperability with transport infrastructure operators with traffic

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information partners or with safety and assistance services (in connection with insurance companies). More efficient traffic control: Putting up road signs at junctions are major tasks of urban traffic control in dense urban areas. They have a direct impact on travel times of all users, including pedestrians. They have a direct effect on congestion and on-street public transport efficiency. Promoting more efficient systems is a key issue. Urban traffic control algorithms are mostly based on two macroscopic data: flow and occupancy rate. Occupancy rate is directly linked to inductive loop detectors, which offer a discrete view of traffic conditions that is highly dependent on detector location. Floating car and mobile data (FCD, FMD) offer a more comprehensive view of traffic conditions and congestion. But in order to be used fully in the whole urban area, it requires a suitable geographic reference system. Another issue of LaSDIM is to demonstrate the feasibility of using floating car data for urban traffic control and

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congestion management. Multi-mode transport, real-time control supposed data exchange using a common geographic reference system. Real multi-modes on-line route guidance for all users: Walking is the greenest way of transportation, and it has a definitely positive impact on health. Every trip includes at least one walking episode. In recent years, the walking market share has increased faster than any other means of transportation in big cities. Walking travel time accounts for a rather large part in travel times, depending on the time of the day. Crowds, heavy traffic also have a direct impact on the speed of walking. Accessibility is also a big concern for a lot of people. The “cyclability” of an infrastructure is a useful indicator

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for cyclists.. Crowd sourcing will be used to test this. Flexible bus priority marked by road signs at junctions. Maintenance is a key issue to offering a high level of priority in the life-cycle of a public transport system.

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Implementing plug and play public transport at marked junctions will solve this problem. Impact of traffic on noise: The Environmental Noise Directive (2002/49/EC) is one of the main instruments of identifying noise pollution levels and its aim is to take the necessary action at a Member State and EU level. In 2011, the Commission also estimated the administrative burden and cost of producing noise maps. The most demanding tasks were connected with obtaining data on noise sources, topography, surrounding buildings and population. The cost of noise mapping varies between 0.33-1.16 EUR/inhabitant, with an average of 0.84 EUR/inhabitant. This cost should be 8


significantly reduced and the time of making them should be shortened by using geographic reference systems and suitable for traffic data location. 5) Conclusion The most important expected impacts are: 1) Unlocking the potential of vast amounts of transport data and solving problems related to transmission, interoperability, storage, processing and safety. Now, there is a profusion of unconnected specific data, acquired from different geographic references, related to the different thematic approaches in the countries concerned or due to historical practices. To improve the existing situation of a system with a vocation for being cross-border and interoperable on multiple systems, that can be applied to transport, commuting and services, all the information should be firstly be handled in one common environment, in order to share and merge data localized through : -

GPS, GNSS coordinates;

- Curvilinear abscissa data; - Postal address. Once such a service of standardized localization is set up, this will allow us to set up a shared infrastructure where incoming or already available information will contribute to greater development, either in larger areas (extension of pilot areas) or involving additional themes. This will involve all the relevant data constructed independently from each other available within the LaSDIM project. At first, this will focus on road data and extended to public and individual surface transport, motorized or soft traffic. This will be directly applied to data and services held by the LaSDIM project, with respect to an open data policy. This initial idea is designed for further extension by third parties, either to integrate their own new data, to set up their new services or to cover new territories. There will be further implementation with regard to existing standards of the LaSDIM project, regarding long-distance truck drive, transport and geo-localization. If adaptation of the existing norms, format or protocol of exchange is necessary, the LaSDIM project undertakes to carry out the necessary work with the authorities in charge for standardization, and talk to the representatives of professional associations. The project will also ensure producing formats that will allow for multiple exchanges between partners. 2) Producing new environmentally-friendly environment held by mapping agencies, will enable new services and propose alternative ideas for the purpose of travelling. This will be a brand-new feature encouraging positive behaviour changes in citizens to use soft and green driving assistance that are more respectful of the environment and leads to a positive, eco-friendly attitude. This will allow lower traffic congestion, reduce pollution levels and optimize emergency-response time.

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References 1. G. Scemama, P. Laffont. (2013). Claire-SITI : système pour la supervision intelligente, intermodale et intégrée des réseaux de transport de surface – L’expérience de la ville de Toulouse In Tec219, (ATEC ITS France). 2. A. Dupéret, F. Aligne, T. Glais, C. Isberie, M. Munoz, G. Scemama, J.H. Wilbrod (2015) Laffont. (2013). Projet RFM LaSDIM, Référentiel francilien de la mobilité/Large Scale Data Infrastructure for Mobility, Application en milieu urbain en Seine-Saint-Denis. Les rencontres de la mobilité intelligente, Paris (Congrès ATEC ITS France 2015). 3. M. Munoz, P. Lombard, A. Dupéret, A. Chaumet, F. Narduzzi (2013) Information géoréférencée en temps réel des déplacements - Approche méthodologique d’intégration de l’information géographique détenue par les exploitants, les autorités organisatrices de transports et l’IGN - Application en milieu urbain en Seine-Saint-Denis (Congrès ATEC ITS France 2015).

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