An Open Extensible Platform for Intermodal Mobility Assistance

Mobility can be considered as an important factor when it comes to assessing ones’ quality of life. Today, there are many different means of transportation available, each one with its particular advantages and drawbacks. Recently, a whole set of new transportation concepts made some noise in the world. As an example, consider electric vehicles or Carand Ride Sharing providers. We do not wish to favour the one or the other concept, in fact, each mean of transportation has its own distinctive charm, depending on the situation. We see the future in an intelligent combination of many different means of transportation, where the selection is aligned with the traffic participants’ preferences and requirement, as well as with external factors. Nevertheless, any attempt implement an automated assistance is aggravated by the distributed nature of the data which is required for such calculation. In this paper we tackle this problem and propose an open, extensible platform on which (mobility) providers can offer their service in a standarised fashion. Based on this platform we present our mobility assistance system which supports users with urban trip-planning and outnumbers comparable approaches inasmuch as intermodal options are considered on yet another level. c © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.