The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility

Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews

Michael Strasser

and Sahin Albayrak

Bosch Software Innovations GmbH, Sch¨oneberger Ufer 89, 10785 Berlin, Germany

DAI Laboratory, Technical University of Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Germany

Keywords:

Qualitative Interviews, Service Marketplaces, Morphological Analysis, Marketplace Evaluation, Software as

a Service, Empiric Studies.

Abstract:

The number of marketplaces for services in the mobility domain is growing which makes it difﬁcult to assess

these systems according their capabilities, designs and operational approaches. Research has shown that the

current state of the art for the mobility service marketplace domain lacks information about current capabil-

ities as well as future trends. Therefore, qualitative interviews with various experts from the ﬁeld have been

conducted to obtain up-to date and relevant information about the currently ongoing efforts and achievements

of marketplaces for mobility services. The interviews covered topics like marketplace architecture, functional

capabilities, business relationships, communication and data exchange as well as protocol standardization and

future trends. The paper presents the obtained information, contributes to the current state of the art as well

as illustrates future trends and requirements of service marketplaces. Based upon the obtained information, a

comprehensive Morphological Box has been developed which serves as a design framework and facilitates the

development of future service marketplaces.

1 INTRODUCTION

Service marketplacesare the trading environmentsfor

all kind of services which provide advantages for cit-

izens, commuters or the city itself. A service mar-

ketplace is the environment which offers capabilities

to register participants, enable them to create service

quotations, to contract and consume services as well

as to do the payment for the B2B service consump-

tion. Services published within a marketplace can

provide access to informationor data reﬁnementfunc-

tionalities. A service marketplace is therefore a piv-

otal point for participants to conduct business and

to exchange all kind of information or functionality

and ushers the interoperability among the participants

(Guo and An, 2014). A disadvantage of today’s ser-

vice marketplaces is that they have a strict domain fo-

cus, like parking

, sharing

or charging

. Even worse,

service marketplaces with the same domain focus ap-

For example: Parkopedia: http://en.parkopedia.co.uk/;

ParkU: https://parku.ch/?lang=en

For example: Car2Go: car2go.com; Multicity: https://

www.multicity-carsharing.de/en/; DriveNow: https://de.

drive-now.com/en/

For example: Green eMotion: http://www.greenemotion-

project.eu/; CROME: http://crome-project.eu/;

ply proprietary protocols (see Section 3.3.1). The dif-

ferences between the available solutions are not all

publicly available. This is just one of the reasons why

the comparison of service marketplace and therefore

the identiﬁcation of the current state of the art is a

cumbersome task. Problematic is also that multiple

visions but no elaborated big picture for the ﬁnal im-

plementation of the current domain exists. Lessons

learned are rarely exchanged and incorporated into

just launching projects. The current state of the art

has to be known to proceed with the requirement en-

gineering process for the later service marketplace re-

alizations (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000).

The paper proceeds as following. Section 2 brieﬂy

introduces the current state of the art. Section 3

presents the conducted qualitative interviews as well

as the derived current state of the art for mobility ser-

vice marketplaces. The section furthermore discusses

the future trends and requirements which have been

particularized by the experts. In Section 4 the elabo-

rated morphological box is presented and discussed.

It serves as a design framework which demonstrates

Hubject: http://www.hubject.com/?lang=en;

e-clearing. net: http://e-clearing.net/;

Gireve: http://www.gireve.com/en/index.html

Strasser, M. and Albayrak, S.

The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews.

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS 2016), pages 21-31

ISBN: 978-989-758-184-7

possible solutions and outlines relationshipsas well as

potential contradictions among service marketplaces’

characteristics and properties. The paper ends with a

summary in Section 5 and an outlook on future work

in Section 6.

2 CURRENT STATE OF THE ART

Service marketplaces are environments where ser-

vice operators (for example infrastructure operators

for charging, parking or sharing capabilities) and re-

spective service consumers can conduct business to

business (B2B) service trades (Grieger, 2003; Al-

brecht et al., 2005; Renna, 2010). At the present

date, various mobility service marketplaces are avail-

able but detailed information about their design, ca-

pabilities and implementation are rare and not easy

to obtain. Due to competition aspects, commercial

solutions do not provide detailed insights into their

operation and design at all. Research projects on the

other hand provide a lot of information but it is dif-

ﬁcult to differentiate between i) what they intend to

achieve, ii) what they tried to achieve and iii) what

they really have achieved and how. Research solu-

tions like CROME (CROME, 2011) and Green eMo-

tion (Green-eMotion, 2011) disappear soon after the

project comes to an end, thus they are unlikely to

attract the attention of business participants. Get-

ting detailed information about the solutions with-

out personal contact is nearly impossible. No mat-

ter what business orientation a marketplace follows,

the lack of information makes their comparison a

difﬁcult and time consuming task. However, infor-

mation is needed by participants to decide whether

a service marketplace satisﬁes their requirements or

not. Thus prospective participants have to conduct

substantial research to get an overview of available

service marketplaces and their capabilities. Miss-

ing standardization in the connected mobility domain

(Rossbach et al., 2013) regarding protocol and service

description as well as inconsistent wording and types

(Martens et al., 2011) makes the assessment and com-

parison process a complicated task.

3 EXPERT INTERVIEWS

3.1 Outline

The work rests upon an empiric research as well as

systemic literature review. The expert interview as

accepted research method is conducted and the qual-

itative approach chosen over the quantitative. This

is because the ﬁeld of interest is infant and still

a niche, thus acknowledged statistics, numbers and

other quantitative information are limited. The goals

of the interviews were i) to obtain detailed and con-

temporary information, ii) to elaborate a comprehen-

sive knowledge base, iii) to analyze the differences

and similarities of the marketplaces in respect to the

design, capabilities, approaches and implementations,

iv)to deduceadvantages and disadvantagesofthe cur-

rent solutionsas well as v) to elaborate an overviewof

requirementsand potential solution approaches which

actively facilitates marketplace realizations in the fu-

ture.

The interviews have been undertaken during July

and August 2015. The interviewed experts who vol-

unteered to participate in the interview are shown in

Table 1. The interviewees have been chosen based on

their experience. They have gained deep knowledge

due to their contribution in various national and inter-

national service provisioning projects. These projects

are all tightly related to service marketplaces, mobil-

ity services, service provisioning and fragmented ser-

vice systems. The set of interviewees is international

and their projects’ are either commercial, research or

a mix of both. This diversityensures a broadoverview

of efforts, achievements and ongoing work which is

put into service marketplaces for mobility services.

3.2 Proceeding and Approach

The questions which were asked have been sent to

the interviewees in advance for preparation issues.

The questions were used as a guideline throughout

the open discussion and were asked when they ﬁt-

ted or when the discussion came to a stop. In addi-

tion, further supporting questions were asked when

applicable. The open discussion allowed to gain a

deep insight into the experts experience. It is believed

that this approach is more efﬁcient and obtain more

and detailed information compared to a pure answer-

response approach. The experts shared information

about their achievements and visions as well as obsta-

cles and problems they have experienced in the rele-

vant projects. The list below brieﬂy summarizes the

major topics which have been discussed with the in-

terviewees to obtain a comprehensive and, even more

important, an up-to-date insight into currently ongo-

ing research and commercial projects. The order of

the listed topics does not reﬂect the topics priority or

importance.

• Architecture for interconnectivity

• Protocol and template standardization

• Contracting approaches

• Service and domain diversity

SMARTGREENS 2016 - 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Table 1: Experts who participated in the qualitative interview.

Sector Sector Roles Actors Interviewees

Economy e-Mobility Startup Gireve Rives, Jean-Marc

Smartlab Hinrichs, Hauke

Schilling, Simon

Conglomerate Siemens AG Dr. Koberg, Hendrik

Consulting Bridging-IT Schuhmann, Detlef

MRK Consulting Keltsch, Thomas

Energy Supplier EnBW Karakoc, Ertan

IT Company Bosch SI Chen, Nigel

H¨orseljau, Till

Weber, Kai

Weiner, Nico

T-Systems Christ, Peter

IBM R&D Fricke, Volker

Politics State Level Departmentof Trafﬁc and Infrastructure(BW) Erdmenger, Christoph

Science R&D University of Applied Science, Ludwigshafen Prof. Dr. Bongard,Stefan

Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) Dr. Rittershaus, Lutz

Flemish Institute for Technological Research

(VITO)

Mol, Carlo

Society R&D eMO (Berlin Agency for Electric Mobility) Eisele, Johannes

• Data security and privacy

• Legal regulations

The interview was conducted as follows:

It started that the experts introduced themselves and

then moved on with their vision about future mobility

and connected mobility. The open discussion moved

towards the issue of interconnectivitybetween service

marketplaces and what architecture might be feasible

for achieving that goal. Network architectures, e.g.

client-server or peer-to-peer based approaches have

been considered and their advantages and disadvan-

tages discussed. The Good e-Roaming Practice guide

(Christ et al., 2015) was used as a foundation for the

discussion. The interview lead over to service con-

tracting approachesto establish relationships between

two participants but also between different market-

places in an ad-hoc fashion via automated contract-

ing. Furthermore, topics like service descriptions,

condition negotiation and payment have been well re-

viewed and possible legal regulations discussed. An

importantpart of the interview was the question of do-

main speciﬁc protocols, protocol standardization and

protocol adaptation. Another point of interest was the

involvedroles and their relationshipsand responsibili-

ties in the service marketplace scenario. An additional

discussed topic was what kind of services should be

offered via a service marketplace and which should be

offered by the participants and which by the market-

place itself. The interview concluded with the ques-

tions about what are the reasons for the little achieve-

ments and why do organization and companies hesi-

tate to invest.

The gained information is unique and beyond

comparison because it is unbiased and unadorned.

The qualitative interview approach in combination

with the guaranteed anonymity created a trustee en-

vironment. The interviewees were encouraged to talk

about their personal experience, opinions and visions

of mobility services and service marketplaces rather

than reﬂecting project disseminations.

3.3 Observation and Findings

The results presented in this section have beenderived

from the qualitative expert interviews but have been

summarized appropriately. If appropriate, the results

are enriched with existing literature.

3.3.1 Current Marketplace Situation

The experts observe that the number of service

marketplaces for mobility services increases con-

tentiously. A marketplace is recognized as the central

service provisioning entity to trade services among

providers and consumers. However, the experts point

out that current solutions operate in isolation even

though there is a general agreement that interconnec-

tivity between the marketplaces is a key requirement.

The interviews also showed that almost all currently

The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews

available marketplace solutions focus on one particu-

lar service domain only. This implies that the market-

places are closed systems and prevent prospective par-

ticipants to register in case they do not suit the mar-

ketplaces’ target domain. This limits the possibilities

for new business models which may inﬂuence partici-

pants in their decisions whether to join a marketplace

or not. However, the number of providers which offer

the same services is not limited. Another point which

concernsthe experts is that present solutions use most

of the time proprietary protocols

. Due to these pro-

prietary protocols, even the marketplaces which focus

on the same mobility domain

differ in their wording,

functionality and scope. The difference in the pro-

tocols is just one of the experts’ emphasized obstacle

which prospectiveparticipantscomeacross duringthe

connection process.

One expert refers that there is slight movement

towards a standard in the charging domain but it is

still a long way to go. This is kind of contradict-

ing with Grathwohl (Grathwohl, 2015) who has al-

ready referred to a charging standard promoted by

Hubject and e-clearing.net. A controversial opinion

among the experts exists whether a trend for a stan-

dardized protocol in the parking and sharing domain

exists or not. The experts have a coherent opinion

about standards in mobility domain when they agree

that there will be a standard for each mobility domain

alike the mobile phone, credit card or ticketing stan-

dard. The ultimate but open question is, according to

the experts, whether the standard will be deﬁned due

to general acceptance or due to legal regulations.

The interviews have shown that no common con-

cept exist which manages how the participants es-

tablish business relationships among each other. A

business relationship is required to represent the par-

ticipant’s agreement to conduct business with each

other. The relationship establishment should follow

the paradigm and actions known from other B2B

marketplaces

. According to the experts, currently

two closing approaches for service marketplaces ex-

ist. The ﬁrst approach requires that each participant,

without exception, has to establish a business relation-

ship with all other participants. This approach is sim-

ilar to a fully-meshed network and requires a lot of

effort from the participants. This enforcement and the

For example: Hubject: Open InterCharge Protocol

(OICP), e-clearing.net: Open Clearing House Proto-

col (OCHP), Bosch: Open Mobility Neutral Interface

(OMNI), Gireve: Electric Mobility Interface Protocol

(EMIP)

For example: Charging, Parking or Sharing

Relationship establishment is discussed by (Goldkuhl,

1998; Strasser, 2015).

required effort might chase away (prospective) par-

ticipants. The second approach applies an individ-

ually relationship establishment where participants

close contracts in respect to suitable service quota-

tions. Both approaches rely upon a pre-negotiated

paper contract which speciﬁes the terms and condi-

tions of the service usage and the business relation-

ship. Two experts emphasize that the paper contract

is, in theory, not longer needed and a digital represen-

tation could replace it. One expert points out that a

digital contract would have a legal binding and thus

would represent an approved business relationship.

According to the interviewees, every business re-

lationship is established either due to a suitable ser-

vice offer or service search quotation. An offer quo-

tation describes the functionality (effect) of the pro-

vided services along with its price, availability and

other supportive information. A search quotation de-

scribes what functionalities are requested and to what

condition it should be offered to become accepted.

The experts recognize the need for a standardized ser-

vice quotation structure and wording. The obstacle of

ambiguous service descriptions is also recognized in

the literature (Martens et al., 2011). Without a stan-

dard, the comparison and interpretation of quotations

is difﬁcult for human and even more for machines. It

is emphasized that certain marketplaces allow to cre-

ate different service offer quotations for the same ser-

vice.

The experts point out that Service Level Agree-

ments (SLAs), if they exist at all, experience little no-

tice in research projects. There is uncertainty about

which SLAs should be speciﬁed by the marketplace

and which by the participants. Even though SLAs

are important, one interviewee argues that SLAs for

marketplaces are considered far too important. He

particularly emphasizes that the unpleasant factor ac-

cording to availability is the underlying mobility in-

frastructure rather than the service marketplace. For

commercial service marketplaces sophisticated SLAs

have to be in place.

Another uncertainty exists about how to handle

terms and conditions and how to realize clearing

(billing) between business partners and across mar-

ketplace boundaries. These issues become even more

complicated when service requests are roamed be-

tween marketplaces which have a different domain

orientation. Gagnol et al. (Gagnol et al., 2013) say

that a payment functionality has been implemented in

the CROME project

. However, CROME realized the

business to customer (B2C) clearing rather than the

B2B. The latter is deemedto be morecomplicated and

is not yet implemented at all. The interviews showed

http://crome-project.eu/

SMARTGREENS 2016 - 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

that concepts about i) how to use foreign services, ii)

how to establish a business relationship between un-

known business parties in respect to contracts and ser-

vice delivery, iii) how to do clearing across market-

places and iv) how to establish a connection to other

marketplaces are not yet elaborated in detail and thus

have not been implemented.

Research has proven that achievements for mobil-

ity service marketplaces are low compared to other

sectors like banking, telecommunication or ship-

ping. These sectors combine services from different

providers which is exactly what connected mobility

also requires. Nearly all experts argue that this situ-

ation is due to the missing mass market for mobility

services. They claim that the young market requires

time to develop properly. The currentsituation is sim-

ilar to a death spiral: Without a mass market the re-

quirements are uncertain and uncertainty leads to low

investments. This reduces the effort put into the de-

velopment of new functionalities and services. This

chases away potentialend-customerswhich abates the

market’s growth straight from the very beginning.

Nevertheless, the experts forecast a change in peo-

ple’s individual mobility. The transportation mean

will not be of importance anymore. The importance

in future for individual mobility is i) how to get to

the destination (using different transportation types),

ii) be there on time, iii) having as little trouble as

possible and iv) with acceptable costs. Using differ-

ent means of transportation to complete a journey is

called intermodality. Nobis (Nobis, 2014) considers

intermodality as a potential trend towards sustainable

individual transportation. Intermodality can only be

achieved once the different mobility services are con-

nected with each other and service marketplaces are

predestined to establish this connectivity.

3.3.2 Future Trends and Requirements

The interviewed experts did not only discuss the cur-

rent state of the art of service marketplaces in the mo-

bility domain but also went into detail regarding fu-

ture service marketplace realizations. Insights into

ongoing efforts have been presented as well as their

personal opinions about future capabilities and re-

quirements discussed. The qualitative answers have

been gathered, compared, if applicable merged and

then transformed into a quantitative representation.

The quantitative results are presented in Figure 1.

The legend on top of Figure 1 shows the num-

ber of experts who have actually discussed a partic-

ular topic. The topics are presented on the left and

groupedinto fourcategories, namelyStandardization,

Centralization, Capabilities and Miscellaneous. The

categories arrangementserves only a good illustration

rather than any particular prioritization. The experts

did either agree or disagree upon a discussed topic.

If they did not completely agree or disagree their an-

swers have been ranked as conditional. Table 2 pro-

vides a brief summary of the numbers presented in

Figure 1. Only those topics are presented which have

been discussed by at least three experts to ensure the

incorporation of all three agreement level.

These interviewees who responded to intercon-

nectivity between service marketplaces agree uncon-

ditionally that it is necessary to connect service mar-

ketplaces. They furthermore agreethat the connection

should rely on a standardized protocol as well as the

elaboration of such a protocol is possible. Regarding

the marketplaces’ interconnectivity, only two-third of

the experts believe that it will be achieved by applying

a central architecture approach where every market-

place has only one single connection to a central man-

agement entity. This architecture is similar to the star-

topology in networks. The remaining third of the ex-

perts suppose that the marketplaces are either directly

connected to each other alike a full-mesh-topology or

that a mix of both approaches prevails. This state-

ment is contradicting because these experts have al-

ready agreed that a central marketplaceis necessary to

avoid multiple connections between service providers

and consumers. But for the higher level (marketplace

interconnectivity) they think that the fully connected

approach is more feasible or that it should be realized

ﬁrst and then modiﬁed towards the central approach.

The minority of experts is convinced that the Eu-

ropean Union or any government will soon pass a

bill to regulate the marketplaces’ development. Only

two experts believe that the costs for transactions or

roaming, the protocol to be used and the connecting

to the marketplace itself should be regulated some-

how. Three experts claim that no regulations should

act upon the young domain. Three other respondents

point out that regulations will take place if i) the over-

all progress of the mobility domain is too slow, ii) the

competition among the marketplace operators is on

the end-customers’ expense or iii) the end-customers

face too many difﬁculties while using connected mo-

bility services.

Unlike the full approval for the standardized mar-

ketplace to marketplace protocol, only 93% of the re-

spondents think that a standardized protocol for each

service domain is possible. A majority of 84% of

the experts argue that a semantic approach for ser-

vice descriptions is too complicated to realize. It

would require to much effort - either from the par-

ticipants or the marketplaces. One interviewee em-

phasizes that semantic requires, for being even able

to develop a common domain language model, a lot

The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

Agree Disagree Conditional

Standardized MP protocol

Templates provisioning

Domain standards

Semantic to costly

MP interoperability

MP as central entity

Central oriented architecture

MP operates over regional

Cost regulations

Automated contracting

Connection regulation

MP service diversity

Attractive participation advantages

MP domain diversity

MP interface diversity

Security approaches

Marketplace SLAs

Little MP connection obstacles

MP supports horizontal services

Intelligent data exchange

Different contract approach

MP requires attractive functions

MP provides own services

MP defines service SLAs

MP hosts services

Participant validations

Service clearing

MP provides protocol adaption

MP stores end

customer data

Not a mass market

No end

customer interference

Neutral MP operator

Standardization

Centralization

Capabilities

Miscellaneous

Number responding experts:

Figure 1: Future Trends and Requirements of Service Marketplaces (MP).

SMARTGREENS 2016 - 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Table 2: Interview Results in Numbers.

Category Topic proportion Avg. number of experts

responding per Topic

Agree-Disagree-Conditional ratio

Standardization 12.5 % 15.25 57 \1 \2

Centralization 21.87 % 10.00 55 \4 \11

Capabilities 56.25 % 10.61 171 \8 \8

Miscellaneous 9.37 % 5.67 16 \0 \1

of knowledge about the existing objects and charac-

teristics. He emphasizes that this knowledge is still

missing. Semantic would probably lead to a situa-

tion where service descriptions are rather different to

each other than similar. Overall, semantic is generally

deemed as a obstacle for the success of service mar-

ketplaces, even in the mid-term future. The remaining

16% of the experts share these concerns but empha-

size that in the future, once semantic moves from the

academic to the commercial usage, semantic service

descriptions enable software agents to discover, to ag-

gregate and to invoke services automatically. And

all this without further human interactions. Alterna-

tively, service templates for service descriptions gain

full encouragement. The marketplace should deﬁne

the structure and the wording to ensure overallquality.

Templates simplify and accelerate the service quota-

tion creation as well as the service quotation eval-

uation process, for human and machines. The dis-

cussed topics in the capabilities section experience

most of the time a general agreement. The experts’

majority point out that the marketplace itself should

have sophisticated SLAs. However, the deﬁnition of

the SLAs for the published services is a controver-

sial topic. Only 61% of the experts support the idea

that a marketplace should deﬁne the minimum SLAs

to which the participants’ services have to comply to.

The remaining 39% believe that the service providers

should deﬁne the SLAs for their services. The reason

for this clash is that the given minimum SLAs would

prevent the offering of expensive services with high

SLAs and cheap services with low SLAs. The pro-

ponents of cheap and expensive services argue that

the SLAs are exposed in the service quotation where

the service is described in detail. This would imply

that the SLAs have to be mandatory in the descrip-

tion which in turn favors the approach of applying

precisely deﬁned templates. The opponents, however,

point out that low quality services have a negative im-

pact on the marketplace’s reputation. A bad reputa-

tion might inﬂuence the decision of prospective par-

ticipants whether to join a marketplace or not. An-

other issue which the experts minority deliberate is

that the marketplace itself should adjust its SLAs ac-

cording to the service with the highest deﬁned SLAs.

This means that the marketplaces’ SLAs have to be at

least as high as the highest service SLA.

The experts agree that a service marketplace

should be able to handle different services from dif-

ferent mobility or mobility related domains. They

also support horizontal services like clearing service

(considered necessary by 100% of the respondents),

service reﬁnement or protocol adaptation (full agree-

ment). Furthermore do the respondents agree that

the registration has to have a certain validation. 90%

of the experts who answered think that the market-

place itself should provide supporting services too

(e.g. B2B clearing, monitoring or service hosting).

In contrast, 10% of the respondents are convinced

that service offerings by the marketplace might inter-

fere with the participants’ business and thus should

be avoided. Service hosting is a capability which six

out of elf experts consider as a supportive capability.

Two other experts suggest that service marketplaces

should not host services as it increases their complex-

ity. The two leftover experts point out that it might be

a beneﬁt for small service providers but not an option

for bigger service providers.

The respondents agree that service diversity, stan-

dardized protocols, access to many potential busi-

ness partners, a sophisticated security concept, vari-

ous supportive capabilities as well as a simple, fast

and effortless connection process increases the mar-

ketplace’s attractiveness and competitive opportuni-

ties. Even though all experts agree that data secu-

rity and end-customer privacyis importantfor all kind

of service marketplaces, only 72% have speciﬁc sug-

gestions about how the marketplaces should handle

it. Some interviewees claim that security starts with

the transportation layer, thus the communication has

to be encrypted. Other experts recommend that the

transmitted content needs to be encrypted too. To en-

sure conﬁdentiality, it is proposedto maintain a Public

Key Infrastructure (PKI). The certiﬁcates can support

the differentiation of public and private (user-driven)

data access via various interfaces. Common fears in

respect to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, power in-

terruption and storage failureare mentioned alike data

conﬁdentiality, integrity and conﬁdentially.

Regarding privacy, the experts emphasize that the

The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews

service marketplace should not store end-customer

data nor maintain an active relationship with end-

customers. The latter statement harmonizes with

Pfeiffer andBach (Pfeiffer and Bach, 2014)who point

out that the end-customer remains with the service

consumer. This implies that the marketplace pro-

cesses end-customer requests only via anonymous

identiﬁers. Two experts point out that if it is necessary

to process personaldata the principleof data economy

has to be applied. Adapting the security level in accor-

dance to the speciﬁc data is recommended by two in-

terview partners which they assume a better approach

than applying the highest security level at any time.

The latter might turn away prospective or already reg-

istered participants. The former decreases the effort,

the investments as well as the obstacles and possible

inconvenienceswhich come with security and privacy

regulations.

Only 50% of all interviewed experts share their

personal opinionabout the possible reasons for the sill

low achievements in connected mobility services and

mobility service marketplaces. However, those who

respond identify without exception the missing mass

market as the major constraint. The missing mass

market, as a logical consequent, has an impact on fur-

ther investments. One expert additionally identiﬁes

the missing collaboration among the marketplace op-

erators as another obstacle for further achievements.

Due to the market situation and the uncertainty about

how the market will develop, it is feasible to as-

sume that marketplace operators try to establish them-

selves on the market ﬁrst before they start to collab-

orate. Another respondent disagrees and points out

that competitive operators are already in contact with

each other. What kind of data and how much data is

shared is not said. Whatever statement is true, it is

general assumed that as soon as the demand for mo-

bility services increases, the investments will increase

too. And then there will be a tangible progress.

A remaining topic is who operates a service mar-

ketplace or the interconnected marketplace ecosys-

tem. Only four experts, which corresponds to a rate

of 22%, had an answer to this topic. Three of them

suggest that a neutral operator like a city, a company,

an organization or a consortium should run it. They

point out that a marketplace should be free of discrim-

ination and therefore the operator should not provide

services that are in conﬂict with those of the partic-

ipants. The remaining expert thinks that the biggest

participant should be in charge for the operation. The

disadvantage of this is that it empowers this particular

participant to enforce its own interests on the expense

of the other participants. Therefore the marketplace is

no longer free of discrimination and conﬂicts of inter-

est may occur. Based on the number of responses in

addition with the controversial suggestions, one can

conclude that the marketplace operation is a difﬁcult

topic which needs a closer consideration.

4 MORPHOLOGICAL BOX -

POTENTIAL MARKETPLACE

SOLUTIONS

To analyze the complex ﬁeld of service market-

places with all its interrelated characteristics and po-

tential contradictions, a morphological analysis has

been conducted which follows Zwicky’s morpholog-

ical analysis

. The morphology of service market-

places is derived from the data deduced from the in-

terviews. It illustrates major characteristics of service

marketplaces which have to be considered while de-

signing new service marketplaces, not only for mo-

bility services. These characteristics, along with pos-

sible properties, have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the

marketplace’s ﬁnal implementation. The chosen im-

plementation approach affects the practicability of a

service marketplace and thus its acceptance. The lat-

ter consequently has an impact on its success on the

market.

Based on the applied morphological analysis a

morphological box is developed. Morphological

boxes help to generate new ideas (Aurich et al., 2010)

because they facilitate the identiﬁcation process of

possible relationships between the characteristics and

properties of the considered problem domain. It fur-

thermore supports the detection of potential contra-

dictions among them. The morphological box en-

ables to set the dimensionsagainst eachother to create

unique states of the system. Each of these possible

states can be a representation of a new marketplace

solution. The ﬁnally elaborated morphological box is

a two dimensional matrix and is shown in Figure 2.

The left outer side presents the leading characteristics

of a marketplace while the corresponding properties

are organized in the dimension on the right side. To

mark out a particular state, only one propertyper char-

acteristic can be selected.

The presented characteristics and properties are in

alignment with the topics presented in Figure 1. Some

topics have been consolidated and are represented in

the cells by a single entry. The following description

explains exemplary how the Morphological Box has

to be read and understood. The chosen properties in

the description represent the experts’ expectations on

future marketplace solutions.

Further information provided by (Ritchey, 1998).

SMARTGREENS 2016 - 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Characteristics

Ownership Public Private Consortium Community

Type of business

miscellaneous

charging sharing parking miscellaneous

Service categories horizontal vertical miscellaneous

Domain focus specialized diverse diverse but with focus

Architecture

client - server miscellaneous

closed half-open open open-managed

s none 1 to 1 1 to many many to many

Participants service provider service consumer

service aggregator

miscellaneous

Number of participants one more than one

not applicable online online with basic

validation

offline offline with extensive

validation

Internal connectivity not applicable pair-wired broker system on-demand

Communication protocol proprietary own default de-facto standard standard harmonized

Domain protocol not available adaptation own default de-facto standard standard harmonized

Service Level Agreements

not available participant driven own level is minimum

for all participant services

is own minimum

Contracting not available short term long term one-time usage

Service condition type not available partner specific

miscellaneous

Service descriptions free text keywords template for parameters and

wording

Interfaces categories public private role dependent miscellaneous

Interface type maschine human miscellaneous

Interfaces puropse informative particular miscellaneous

not available participant driven own driven miscellaneous

Service hosting not available internally hosted externally hosted miscellaneous

Data configuration not available basic participant data service quotations complete

not available pair-wired central managed decentral managed on-demand

own default adaptation de-factor standard standard harmonized

Support not available technical business different support levels

Security not available encrypted

communication

encrypted communication

and content

and roles

security depends on

continuous

not applicable data set stored

not applicable sometimes exchanged frequently exchanged

Data accuracy not applicable lists sometimes

exchanged

lists frequently exchanged

real time

Properties

Figure 2: Morphological box: characteristics of service marketplaces.

The ﬁrst characteristic in the box is about the

marketplace’s Ownership, thus asks who operates the

marketplace. Possible values (properties) are that it is

operated by, for example, a city (public), the biggest

participant or a company (private), that it is a mix of

the former two (consortium) or by a group of indi-

viduals with the same interests who volunteer to con-

tribute (community). This question is not yet solved

properly. On the other side, the discussion about the

marketplace’s business orientation (Type of business)

concluded that the marketplace should not be in con-

tact with end-customers. Thus the selected property

for the business type is B2B. As the experts empha-

sized, marketplaces should not focus on particular ser-

vices and therefore the property for the Business fo-

cus is miscellaneous. Service diversity is considered

as necessary and thus miscellaneous is selected for

the Service categories. On the other side, diversity

should not lead to uncontrolled service publishing.

Thus the Domain focus is diverse but with focus. This

means that the services have to have a focus on mo-

bility or represent a beneﬁt for the entire marketplace.

The marketplaces should be open systems and there-

fore should not discriminate prospective participants.

However, the interviewees pointed out that some kind

of validation has to be in place to identify a prospec-

tive participant’s seriousness and willingness to con-

duct business. Thus the open-managed property is in

favor for the Openness characteristic. Even though

most marketplaces use a proprietary protocol, the ex-

perts forecast that a standard protocol is always the

ﬁrst choice. This property is thus selected for the in-

ternal Domain protocol but also for the External pro-

tocol. The latter is the protocolfor the communication

between service marketplaces.

The MorphologicalBox is elaboratedbased on the

interviews’ output. Even though the interviews yield

upon service marketplaces for the mobility service

domain, the characteristics and properties presented

in Figure 2 are of such generic nature that they are

applicable, to certain extend, for all kind of service

marketplaces. According to Stryja et al. (Stryja et al.,

2015), a Morphological Box facilitates the identiﬁ-

cation of possible contradictions in the values of the

property dimension. Once the characteristics and the

correspondingpropertiesare known thecomplexity of

The Current Situation and Future Trends of Marketplaces for Mobility Services: Findings From Qualitative Expert Interviews

the marketplace’s design is reduced. The Morpholog-

ical Box does not claim to be complete, but serves as a

design framework for service marketplaces which can

be developed further in respect to the characteristics

and properties.

5 SUMMARY

The authors identiﬁed the lack of information about

the currently ongoing efforts and achievements for

service marketplaces in the mobility domain. There-

fore, comprehensive interviews with experts from the

particular ﬁeld have been undertaken. The experts’

opinions have been gathered which enabled the au-

thors to propound the current state of the art for ser-

vice marketplaces in the mobility domain. The in-

terviews have unambiguously shown that current ser-

vice marketplaces suffer various gaps and limitations

regarding their implementation and functional capa-

bilities. Due to the comprehensive interviews, the au-

thors also presented the identiﬁed future trends and

requirements for service marketplaces. The experts

believe that these factors have to be incorporated into

future realizations. Additionally, these factors have

been transferred into a qualitative overview which

simpliﬁes the evaluation process. Based on the result-

ing overview it can be concluded that certain topics

experience high attention while others are not really

on the experts’ agenda. Therefore, this overview re-

ﬂects the current situation for mobility service mar-

ketplaces solutions - they are complex and differ in

their design, approach, implementation, orientation

and scope. Based onthe ﬁndings a morphologicalbox

has been elaborated which presents the characteristics

and properties of service marketplaces. This box is

the ﬁrst which depicts the complexity of the partially

contradicting objects that constitute a service market-

place. The box incorporates the ﬁndings from the

interviews and provides a design framework which

facilitates the development of future service market-

places.

6 OUTLOOK ON FUTURE WORK

Even if the design of future marketplaces has consid-

ered the elaborated Morphological Box, its ﬁnal im-

plementations can still differ. The differences in the

solutions provide difﬁculties when assessing a mar-

ketplace’s maturity. It is even more difﬁcult to as-

sess and evaluate the marketplaces against each other.

Therefore, the next research step will be the deﬁni-

tion of an ideal service marketplace based upon the

experts’ requirements and suggested solutions. This

ideal marketplace will be used as a reference system

on which a maturity model will be developed. This

model will facilitate the assessment of the maturity

level of service marketplaces.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work has been conducted within a project (sup-

port code 16SBB007C) funded by the German Fed-

eral Ministry of Economics and Technology.

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