Improving urban transportation: An open plat-form for digital mobility services

Abstract

Due to the ubiquity of smartphones, the impact of digital mobility services on individual traffic behavior within cities has increased significantly over the last years. Companies, as for example Google, and city administrations or parastatal municipal transport providers issue digital mobility services. As a result, a heterogeneous landscape of digitalmobility services has emerged.While the services serve different needs, they are based on similar service modules and data sources. By analyzing 59 digitalmobility services available as smartphone applications or web services, we show that an integration of service modules and data sources can increase the value of digital mobility services. Based on this analysis, we propose a concept for the architecture of an open platform for digital mobility services that enables co-creation of value by making data sources and service modules available for developers. The concept developed for the platform architecture consists of the following elements: data sources, layers of modular services, an integration layer and solutions.We illustrated the concept by describing possible modular services and how they could be used to improve urban transportation. Our work supports practitioners from industry and public administration in identifying potential for innovative services and foster co-creation and innovation within existing systems for urban transportation.