Region Groningen, The Nether-lands

Student assignmentsBased on the Service InnovationWorksop of September 2012 andthe user scenario’s, written for theselected ideas, in the end of 2012three student assignments weremade for developing ICT-applica-tions. In the first months of 2013ICT and Media students of theHanze University started workingon their assignments. The use of public transport and carsharing is facilitated by easily acces-sible, understandable and timely in-formation. More and moretravellers have a smart phone ortablet and thus new ways to gettheir information. Students atHanze University Groningen de-velop different ICT applications forthe project. The prototypes will betested among the target groups inthe region in the second half of2013 and the first months of 2014. The students can also make use of

knowledge and experience of col-leges and universities in the coun-tries of the project partnersinvolved. Two students will attendthe Mid Term Conference in theUK to present and discuss theirwork.Applications in development are:

a guide for the new and inexperi-enced traveller, ‘Step by Step’a ‘Get Connected’ application forlonger trips, including a ‘Market-place’ for transport from and tomajor bus stops or train stations”Tell us”, through which travellerscan give their opinion about theirjourney and share ideas about op-timizing public transportShuttle Drive, a car sharing sys-tem

EU Kijkdagen (EU Open days)On May 10 and 11 ITRACT pre-sented itself at the EU Kijkdagen inGroningen. Apart from the generalinformation about the project , thefirst try outs for ICT applications,developed by students, were avail-able on laptops. ITRACT Gronin-gen produced a new folder, abanner and a give-away for this oc-casion.

The Yorkshire Dales

Dales hub dashboard conceptThe Dales Hub Dashboard idea,

formulated during theITRACT Service Innova-

tion Workshop last year, has nowbeen developed into a tangible so-lution. Although still quite rudi-mentary, the hub dashboard can bedisplayed from any screen to dis-play bus scheduled and real timedepartures, travel disruption news,local weather and news based onthe location of each hub. Demon-strations have now taken place atthe Grassington, Pateley Bridge andLeyburn hubs using a portable all-in-one PC. It was encouraging tohave two local bus operators in at-

I N T E R R E G N O R T H S E A

N E W S L E T T E R , N o . 3 , S p r i n g 2 0 1 3

ITRACTImproving Transport and Accessibility through

new Communication TechnologiesITRACT Lead partner,

Contact:Theo MiljoenHanze UniversityGroningen, The Netherlandst.a.miljoen@pl.hanze.nl

+31 505955565

http://itract-project.eu

tendance at Grassington, their valu-able feedback will be used to fur-ther develop the concept. In figure1 you can get an idea of how thehub dashboard currently looks. In order to get the bus departurespart of the display working, theMetro Telematics department puttogether websites that display bothscheduled and Real Time informa-tion for a cluster of bus stops acrosseach Dales hub location. This canbe seen in the top left of figure 1.

Although this concept uses a freeapplication called Digital Signageit is hoped that this concept can bedeveloped further into either asmart phone enabled website or asmart application.

ITRACT presentation in Grass-ingtonOn 5th March 2013 an ITRACTpresentation took place in the pic-turesque town of Grassington,within the Town Hall (see figure 2).In attendance there were Dales hubvolunteers, local authority andDITA (Dales Integrated TransportAlliance) representatives. This gavea great opportunity to share someof the ideas that were currentlybeing looked at being developed inITRACT and possible areas fortesting these concepts as pilot serv-ices.

Mobile Data signal strength map-ping exerciseDue to the importance of therebeing some kind of a mobile datasignal in areas where ITRACT pi-lots are likely to take place, focus-ing around each Dales hub, a signalstrength test exercise hasnow commenced. Using afree Android applicationcalled Root Metrics (avail-able for the iPhone also)the UK partner has startedto test certain networks tofind out where smartphone pilot services arelikely to face signalstrength issues. As RootMetrics success dependson “crowd sourcing” tech-niques, a request has beensent round to both DITAand ITRACT stakeholdersin the UK to downloadthe application and runsignal strength tests whenin the Yorkshire Dales.This should provide somegreat results for mobiledata signal strength where mostneeded. An example of what testshave provided in Leyburn andGrassington so far can be seen infigure below.

Region Värmland

Information Architecture ReachesSecond LevelThe development of the informa-tion architecture and exchangemechanisms in WP4 is furtherunder development. Our work haschanged focus from an overviewlevel towards a detailed architecturedesign and implementation for Iter-ation 2. The backend infrastructureis now capable of gathering staticinformation from different infor-mation sources provided by differ-ent transport authorities, includingtimetables and trip informationbased on GTFS (General TransitFeed Specification). We have inte-grated several services such as trip-planning and information aboutpublic transport stops and routes,

and we provide web service accesstowards those services. To ensurethat we are able to meet high per-formance requirements we havechosen a virtualized environment inthe Cloud. To this extent, we haveset up a local Cloud based onOpenStack, which runs our servicesin a scalable way. In addition, wehave installed Wordpress, whichgives developers the possibility touse our Cloud as a content store.

Demo ApplicationsStudents from Karlstad Universityare currently developing two demoapplications as a result of the serv-ice innovation workshop that washeld in Värmland in October. Theapplications under development area smart live travel map and a mo-bile app for order on demand-traf-fic. We aim to have them ready forpilot test in the fall.

http://itract-project.eu

Swedish Partner Meeting in StenungssundThe 26th of April Värmlandstrafikarranged a meeting with SwedishITRACT partners at Hogia in Ste-nungsund. Our hosts, Hogia, offerssolutions and products within thefields of central database manage-ment, integration, operation & in-formation control, realtimepassenger information and opera-tional follow-up. During the meeting Hogia pre-sented their public transport sys-tems, and Hogia PubTrans inparticular. Per-Erik from ViktoriaSwedish ICT told us about the re-cently completed ISET-project, andthe four students from KarlstadUniversity presented their workwith developing two demo applica-tions within ITRACT

Region Rogaland, Norway

Rogaland hosted the ITRACTmeeting in December 2012. At thatstage it was determined that severalof the building blocks were of inter-est to the area. One building blockcalled Traffic Management was alsoset to be developed in Rogaland,but this was not aimed to be a soft-ware unit and therefore not relatedto WP4. However, early in 2013,we realized that the implementa-tion process at least in Rogaland fora traffic management method,would be too long and could atbest start after the end of ITRACT.It was therefore cancelled, and wewait for the building blocks devel-oped at other ITRACT partners. Inparrallell with the ITRACT devel-opment, the bus company in Roga-land, Kolumbus, had started with adevelopment on their own togetherwith Google. In June 2012 this wasreleased on itunes and for android.It is an APP for planning journeysthat checks where the user are, tellsabout nearby bus stops and sched-uled arrivals, and suggests how toget to your destination by publictransport.In February 2013, Kolumbus re-leased another APP. This time ittells you when to expect a bus to ar-

rive in real time, not only accordingto predefined schedule. This onewill also be accompanied by onlinescreens on some bus stops and in-side many busses. According tosome public feedback the realtimeAPP is functioning well on some ofthe routes.In parallell University of Stavangerhave had out a questionnaire to testpublic opinion about choices forpublic transport in general, andAPP use ands bus on demand.Some simulation models have alsobeen done.As of May 2013 four students areengaged to plan and do testing inthe region. This includes to findand promote the APP use for rele-vant user groups. And then test theuse and attitudes by comparing allITRACT APPS with the KolumbusAPPS, and to test Bus On Demandas a special issue.The students will also take part inWP2 as content providers for all rel-evant medias. A possibility to addvideo production clips as part of thedocumentation will be determinedlater. In Rogaland ITRACT projectis a combined prohject between Uni-versuity of Stavanger and Traffic Of-fice of Rogaland County.

Jade University, GermanyThe ITRACT project was pre-sented to different groups duringthe last months. There was a con-ference about the interreg IVb proj-ects at Wilhelmshaven with anexhibition to the current projects,where Jade University presentedITRACT (see photograph Han-nover).There also was a presentation of theproject during the NKIF Confer-ence (Norddeutsche Konferenz zurInformatik an Fachhochschulen) atWismar where the aims of the proj-ect and the current status was pre-sented to members of other northgerman universities of applied sci-ences (see photograph Wismar).

Workpackage 5

During the last project period theJade University of Applied Science inWilhemshaven responsible for work-package 5 has established its internalpersonal structure. Dr. Schmoll fromJade University has entered the proj-e c tgroup http://itract-project.eu

of WP5, he is responsible for themarketing of the workpackage likeits Facebook presentation as well asother public relationship issues. Fol-lowing the demand of the entireproject the deadline of activity 5.1(Develop an organisational modelfor testing and training innovativetransport concepts) has beenbrought forward to end of February2013: WP5 will provide the appli-cation builder within the wholeproject with a checklist that con-tains important facts concerning theusability of ITRACT-mobile appli-cations. Usability with regard toITRACT means that the generatedmobile applications comply withthe users needs with effectiveness,efficiency and satisfaction. More-over WP5 was involved in thepreparation and organization of the

Stavanger meeting (28th-30th No-vember 2012) that aimed in a pri-oritized overview of all the serviceideas coming from the service inno-vations workshops (SIW) per regionand project members that are re-sponsible for building and realisa-tion these ideas. Based on the results

of the SIW organized by VEJ fourideas are already in a process of de-velopment at Jade University:

Students as well as scientific staffmembers have been working on ap-

plications for tracking busses in re-altime (hardware solution seepictures), for checking bus tickets ofpupils via smartphone, for low costdisplays for bus stops in rural areasas well as for an online route net-work.

Web site of ITRACT.

e website was restructured midApril 2013. e intention was tomove the focus from plans andinternal processes to results.So far, more and more contenthave been added in the newstructure, but to keep a site LIVEwe need more frequent input fromregions and workpackages. enumber of visitors per day morethan doubled with the newstructure. e graph shows thenumber of visitors per day for lastmonth, and one of three of thesevisitors are new since therestructuring. Since December2012 1600 people have visited thesite.It is appreciated if new content toprojectplace.com (the projectinternal communication platt-form) are followed by a mailindicating if new content can bepublished on the site or in a news-letter.