OPTIMUM: A short description

Multi-source Big Data Fusion Driven Proactivity for Intelligent Mobility

The EU-funded OPTIMUM project is working to unveil state-of-the-art information technology solutions to improve transit, freight transportation and traffic connectivity throughout Europe. Through tailor-made applications, OPTIMUM is striving to bring proactive and problem-free mobility to modern transport systems by introducing and promoting interoperability, adaptability and dynamicity.

Background

The transportation sector is undergoing considerable transformation with seamless connectivity and ever-increasing mobility options. Modern transportation systems have to mitigate problems emerging from complex mobility environments and the intensive use of transport networks, such as excessive CO₂ emissions, high congestion levels and diminished quality of life. Due to the saturation and complexity of transport networks, innovative solutions to these problems need to be underpinned by collected, processed and broadcasted data from various sensors, systems, crowdsourcing and service providers. Furthermore, digital-age transport systems will have to anticipate situations in near real time and provide the means for proactive decisions, which, in turn, will prevent problems before they emerge.

Goals

OPTIMUM establishes largely scalable architecture for the management and processing of multisource big data, which enables the continuous monitoring of transportation system needs while facilitating proactive decisions and actions in a semi-automated way. The project follows a cognitive approach based on the big data supply chain loop “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act”, with the aim of achieving continuous situational awareness. Among other things, OPTIMUM aims to:

• capitalise on the benefits and potential of big data fusion and proactive behaviour in the context of diverse and multimodal transportation by designing a distributed and scalable architecture;
• enable comprehensive observations of the transport ecosystem by designing and developing a smart sensing system able to cope with huge amounts of heterogeneous data in real time (Observe);
• enable semantic understanding of acquired data and predict the status of transport networks for short- and medium-term horizons by designing and developing an efficient management framework for dynamic (proactive) and context-aware forecasting and the detection of situations of interest on the basis of complex and predictive data analysis algorithms and event detection (Orient);
• realise sustainable transportation behaviours through system-aware optimisation mechanisms that integrate adaptive charging and crediting models and real-time multimodal routing and navigation algorithms (Decide);
• support proactive decisions and sustainable transportation behaviours through proactive information provisioning and personalisation (Act);
• deploy proposed solutions in real-life pilots to place challenging use cases in the domain of the proactive improvement of transport system quality and efficiency — such as proactive charging for freight transport and Car2X communication integration; and
• enable the provision of suitable business models for the commercialisation of results beyond selected end-user pilots to ensure the impact of the OPTIMUM approach.