‘Bobby’, a smartphone application that won the MOBiNET 10K and eSafety Aware incubation prize at the ITS World Congress 2015 Hackathon in Bordeaux last year, has been on demonstration at the European ITS Congress in Glasgow, this week.
The challenge of the Bordeaux Hackathon was to come up with new ideas and apps for mobility or safety services using the different components and tools of the MOBiNET platform. Co-funded by the European Commission under the Seventh TRD Framework Program, MOBiNET envisages a new ‘Internet of Mobility’, where transport users meet providers of next-generation mobility services.
MOBiNET offers a Business-to-Business marketplace where commercial and public-sector providers of mobility data and services can publish and exchange their products and/or find other business services to extend their own offerings. At last year’s ITS World Congress in France, MOBiNET launched the third release its platform, introducing it to developers and start-ups in the context of the Hackathon, which was organized to stimulate new service ideas.
The Bobby team used the MOBiNET Service Directory, a database of transport and mobility data and services, and the MOBiAGENT application to create a mobile app that triggers actions based on proximity and predefined waypoints. Described as, ‘Your daily commuting buddy’, Bobby allows the user to automate actions related to their mobility, and executes them at the right time and place, without having to touch their.
The application triggers alerts on public and shared transports, as well as parking, available in the user’s vicinity, in order to make journeys safer, more time-efficient, and to streamline the user’s movements. Using a geo-fencing Android system, the Bobby App will automatically: send an SMS text or email when passing close to a selected place; show the next passing bus and tram in the vicinity; display the status of various nearby public / private car parks; reveal the bike availability at nearby stations; and provide the real-time traffic status of a selected area.
The application was already available in the French cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse as part of a MOBiNET pilot program. For the European Congress demonstration, the MOBiNET team also integrated Glasgow city data, as well as other cities’ available in the MOBiNET Service Directory. For any city where a user is travelling to, the Bobby API looks up to see if it has services available on its server; if none is found, the API queries the Directory to see if it includes such services around the user’s location.
The development of Release 3.1 of the MOBiNET platform is currently ongoing, and will include all the core functionalities already available in the previous release, as well as the billing and clearing module. The 3.1 release will be validated at the pilot sites in autumn 2016, and the final Platform release, which will include all modifications necessary that came out of the verification and validation of R3.1, is scheduled in spring 2017. The final event of MOBiNET will take place at the ITS European Congress in Strasbourg, France, in June 2017.
