Every day worldwide, millions of commuters buy and use transit and parking tickets, creating massive amounts of data about their daily transportation habits. Xerox has recently introduced a platform that analyses this anonymous data quickly and accurately and presents the information with user-friendly graphics, making it easy for transport and parking operators to better understand, and even predict, commuter needs. The company’s new Mobility Analytics Platform (MAP) provides a city-wide picture of transportation operations, including, adherence to schedules, passenger-loading levels and car park usage rates. Using data analytics algorithms and visualization technology that was developed at Xerox’s European Research Center, the MAP can predict, for example, where passengers will alight and the impact of varying factors, such as running ahead or behind schedule, and the weather. MAP is currently available in all regions except North America. Future enhancements to the system will be available later in 2015, which will enable the platform to run simulations and estimate the outcome of changing routes, providing new services or introducing dynamic fare structures. Jo van Onsem, group president of Xerox’s international public sector business unit, said, “MAP gives operators the keys to improving the quality and adoption of services. Our MAP innovation is a major contribution to the development of improved urban mobility.”
The Australian city of Adelaide, which has embarked on a 30-year urban development plan, is piloting MAP to improve its public transport services by analyzing people flows between different sectors of the city. The MAP technology is also being tested by VINCI Park, the world’s leading parking space provider, in Neuilly, a town in the western suburbs of Paris, where it manages on- and off-street parking. The operator is using MAP to better understand how its off-street car parks are used. In a second phase of testing, the parking information will be combined with MAP’s advanced customer profiling features to predict future demand for parking, inform VINCI Park on how to modify prices, identify when extra access lanes are required or even where new car parks should be created. Albert Feuga, director of parking management systems at VINCI Park, noted, “With MAP we now have a user-friendly graphical tool that allows us to analyze quickly and accurately the use and revenues of our car parks. MAP also allows us to understand the behavior of our customers, and better anticipate demand and manage flows.”
