Integra System

João C. Ferreira

1,3

, Porfírio P. Filipe

and Paulo M. Martins

ADDETC-ISEL, Lisbon, Portugal

ADEC-ISEL, Lisbon, Portugal

Centro Algoritmi, Univerdidade Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

Keywords: Public Transportation, Data Integration, Sustainable Mobility, Car Sharing, Bike Sharing, Mobile System.

Abstract: The current work deals with the scenario of growing population in the cities and the associated sustainable

mobility problems. To address this issue it was developed a computational system called INTEGRA, ready

for mobile devices, based on the integration from heterogeneous data sources such as multi-modal public

transportation systems, car and bike sharing. This system is able to show and give guidance towards points

of interests (POI) and promote a social collaborative network sharing annotations about sustainable mobility

options. This work is a contribution for the European Project START. The project’s goal is to make travel

easy and sustainable improving the quality of information provided to travellers. This goal is shared by

transport operators and authorities associated to the Integra registered brand, promoted by the START

consortium, that is already prepared for UK, France, Spain and Portugal.

1 INTRODUCTION

There is difficulty in obtaining information about

traveling to, from and within a region, even in the

same city, due to the diversity of transportation

operators. Most of these operators have their own

system, so that they work and plan the routes and

schedules independently of nearby operators. Also

public transport systems differ from region to

region. It is therefore understandable that when

reaching a destination, even for the most traveled

user, it becomes difficult to use local public

transport due to poor organization of information,

and especially due to language barriers, for those

who do not speak the native language of the country.

In this context, is denoted the scarcity of appropriate

information systems to assist travelers in the region,

including providing practical information, essential

to understand the operation of the means of

transportation.

The availability of the Internet and the current

development of Information and Communication

Technologies (ICT), became the best way to

disseminate information, inspiring the development

of strategies to support tourism and culture.

Additionally, the mobile guides are increasingly

seen as an asset to offer an experience more

appealing of visitation and interpretation to natural

parks or historic sights. Technological advances

allow higher processing in smaller devices, making

possible the use of technologies such as GPS and

Wi-Fi. In addition, the popularity of social networks,

like Facebook, showed the willingness of users to

share their experiences and be part of communities

with similar interests.

Part of this research work was used in ISEL

participation on the Seamless Travel across the

Atlantic Regions using sustainable Transport

(START) project. START Project is a European

Commission’s Transnational Territorial Cooperation

Programme with 14 partners from the UK, France,

Spain and Portugal. The main mission is the

establishing of a transnational network of regional &

local authorities to promote enhanced accessibility,

giving tools to make easy to travel to, from, and

around the Atlantic regions, using environmentally

friendly, collective modes of transport, greater

interconnectivity between transport systems, clearer

information within regional gateways, airport hubs

ports and rail interchanges. For more information

see (http://www.start-project.eu).

Main contribution of ISEL on this project was

the data integration of multiple transportation

sources (Costa, 2010), a system to support user on

public transportation query data and a Car and Bike

sharing System (Xavier and Lourenço, 2011). The

C. Ferreira J., P. Filipe P. and M. Martins P..

Integra System.

DOI: 10.5220/0004342400570064

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2013), pages 57-64

ISBN: 978-989-8565-54-9

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

INTEGRA system should allow the interrogation of

multiple sources of information through a single

interface. The questions and answers to them should

reflect a single data model. The existence of a single

common data model takes the client applications

with the difficult task of dealing with various

technologies and their relational schemas different.

Different public transportation systems can be added

with total transparently to the end user. From

START project different public transportation data

and data base schemas were tested. Also this

integration allows the creation of mobile systems

oriented for tourisms purposes, other main goal of

START project, where “low budget tourism” can be

guided, to reach POI (Points of Interest) by public

transportation, look and reserve parking slots.

2 PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

INFORMATION INTEGRATION

In Figure 1 is illustrated the public transportation

different sources data integration approach, where is

possible data information integration from different

operators of public transportation. This application

output is a user Mobile Device, or Web Application

SITP, that is described in Section 3. The data

integration is based on a domain ontology (Ontology

for Public Transportation - OPT) (Ferreira et al.,

2011a), a wrapper that performs the mapping

between different public transportation data base

models and a mediator. If the public transportation

operator data base is constructed under OPT the

wrapper and the mapping definition are not needed.

Wrapper is developed at each operator side based on

operator information source and is a common

interface for data access. In Figure 2 is presented the

wrapper solution based on (Bizer, 2009). D2RQ is a

declarative language to describe mappings between

relational database schemata and OWL/RDFS

ontologies. The D2RQ Platform uses these mapping

to enable applications to access a Resource

Description Framework (RDF) view on a non-RDF

database through the Jena and Sesame APIs, as well

as over the Web via the SPARQL Protocol and as

Linked Data.

SGBD Schema Publication is the mapping

process between local data base and the vocabulary

of the ontology (OPT) using R2RQ language. The

Process is divided in the following steps: (1) entity

definition; (2) adding of proprietaries to the entities;

(3) connection of entities; and (4) definition of

conditions and aggregations (when necessary).

Figure 1: Different Sources of Public Transportation Data

Integration Approach.

Mediator is based on MediaSpaces Mapping

Framework, where it is possible to perform

SPARQL queries based on OPT.

Figure 2: Platform D2RQ used at Wrapper Components.

3 SITP APPLICATION

SITP is the application to handle public

transportation information in a mobile or web

application and is part of Integra system. In Figure 3,

is illustrated a typical client operation from the client

side: search for stops, search information of public

transportation for a certain path, get price, schedules

and best itineraries path options. From the operator

are showed the registration and the registration of

DB schema.

Figure 3: Use Case for SITP Application.

WEBIST2013-9thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

Two Web applications were developed:

• SITP, to support queries from users;

• SITP, for the management of information by the

public transportation operators.

These applications were implemented in

ASP.NET MVC platform. For more details, see

(Domingues, 2010).

The SITP was implemented to allow the user to

search for routes, stops, query times and fares.

Figure 4 illustrates the application menu to support

these functionalities.

Figure 4: SITP - Web Client Application Menu.

The developed application has the basic structure of

a Master Page with an application menu.

The menu implemented allows navigation of the

site as intended, with Multi-Language support and a

link to access mobile devices (see Figure 4 and

Figure 5).

Figure 5: SITP - Available Menu for Users.

Figure 6: SITP - Available Menu for Public Transportation

Operators.

In Figure 7, we show a SITP search for near public

transportation (stops), using a pre-defined radius

from current user position.

Taking into account current time the SIPT indicates

also close public transportation to arrive on selected

stops.

In Figure 8, we show a case of getting public

transportation prices for the desired journey for the

Portuguese company CP (a railway company).

Figure 7: Search Result of a User Query for a PT Stop in a

Radius of 50m from his Current Position in Lisbon (Cais

do Sodré, Description in Portuguese Language).

Figure 8: Search Result of a User Price Query for CP

Public Transportation Operator (Description in Portuguese

Language).

4 CAR SHARING SYSTEM

Car sharing systems balance between private and

public modes of transportation. They allow

individuals to use a car when needed without having

to buy one for their exclusive purpose. This,

obviously, comes with some inconveniences, such as

having to reserve the car for a predefined period,

having to walk to the nearest parking lot, or needing

to select another mode of transportation if no car is

available. However, it also has many advantages

because it gives access to a private, flexible mode of

transportation, without having the entire burden that

comes with it. Hence, it is not that surprising to see

that car-sharing systems are becoming more and

more popular and that people are willing to engage

in this new mode of transportation.

Car sharing is not a new transportation mode.

Years ago, when cars were luxurious goods,

households were uniting to buy one. Its ownership

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and use were shared. It was for these households the

only way to have access to an automobile.

Nowadays, car sharing responds to new needs and is

provided in an organized system. People want to

benefit from the car’s flexibility without supporting

all its inherent costs: insurance, parking,

maintenance, etc. Users are also attracted to car

sharing because of its good environmental image

(Steininger, 1996). Figure 9 shows eleven car

sharing parking locations in Lisbon, what represents

a reasonable implementation of car sharing

initiative. Car sharing services are managed by

companies, like short term car rentals. Car Sharing

Organizations (CSO) usually manages a fleet of

vehicles dispatched in several predetermined parking

lots. Members have access to any vehicle at any

time, given that they have made a reservation in

advance. Car keys are usually located in a safe-

deposit box located near the parking lot. Users can

keep the vehicle during a fixed period of time that

can vary from one hour to several days. At the end

of the rental period, the vehicle has to be returned to

a parking lot (usually the one where the car was

taken). Traveled distances and rental durations are

recorded and used for the billing of every user (fees

depend on the total duration and mileage) (Barth and

Todd, 2001).

Figure 9: Car Sharing Parking Places Available in Lisbon,

Status Jully 2011.

Some studies have been conducted to estimate the

potential of car sharing in urban transportation and

changes in transportation behavior when a car

sharing service is available (Lee, 1998), (Cervero,

2002) and (Steininger, 1996). Cervero et al.

(Cervero and Wu, 2002) state that this mode could

attract users towards individual car ownership for

the San Francisco area. Other authors indicate that,

on contrary, CSO helps to decrease car ownership

because some users leave their individual car to

enter the system. Positive impacts of car sharing on

travel demand and on greenhouse gases (GHG)

emissions were also reported by Morency (Morency

et al., 2007). Most of these studies are based on user

surveys and can hardly characterized long run use of

car sharing. Barth et al. demonstrated the

potentialities of using individual data collected in a

multi-station shared vehicle system (Barth and Todd,

2001). On a pure economic basis, CSO can be both

viable and profitable (Wright, 2001). Several

systems are running through the world, especially in

Europe (UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands), in

Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City) and in the

United States (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco area).

The proposed system is similar to the reservation

slots of a public charging station and it was

developed in a Final Year Project at ISEL (Xavier

and Lourenço, 2011). Main system functionalities

are described in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Use Case for Car Sharing System.

5 BIKE SHARING SYSTEM

Bike share is an emerging urban transportation

concept based on collective paid use of a distributed

supply of public bicycles. It is similar in function

and programming to car sharing initiatives that have

been very successful in several places. In general,

bike sharing consists of strategically distributed

“stations” containing ten to twenty bikes on average,

with a centralized payment/control kiosk.

Customers—who range from one-time users to long

term subscribers, “unlock” a bicycle with a credit

card or smartcard, then ride to any other station in

the city where they can deposit the bike, concluding

their trip. Bike share fills a number of key “niches”

WEBIST2013-9thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

in the urban travel market and is particularly useful

for relatively short-range travel beyond the length of

comfortable walking distance. Its key advantage is

that it gives virtually everyone access to what in the

past had largely been viewed as a specialized form

of urban transport, promising increased use of bikes

for short-distance travel, helping to decrease

pressure on traffic and transit systems.

Main functionalities of the proposed Bike

Sharing system are defined in Figure 11 and for

more details see master project at ISEL (Costa,

2010).

Figure 11: Main Bike Sharing System Functionalities.

5.1 Weather

The extremes of weather affect bicycling more so

than any other practical mode of transportation, on

both short-term (day-by-day) basis and longer-term

trends. Extreme heat, extreme cold, and heavy

rainfall are the top weather phenomena leading to

decreased numbers of cycling trips. User Profile can

be used to define if the user wants to use a bike

under certain weather conditions (rain, too cold or

hot).

5.2 Topography

Like weather, topography has an impact on the

willingness of people to use bicycles, although in

this case it is often limited to certain trip patterns

rather than affecting system usage as a whole. This

is apparent in the evaluated European bike share

cities, which regularly exhibit shortages of bicycles

at stations at the tops of hills or steep gradients,

suggesting that many users are riding downhill but

not back upwards. The study of the slope is

particularly important for cyclists and pedestrians.

For the slope Google API allows the following

operations: (1) get the altitude of a particular point;

(2) get the altitude of n points in a straight line path,

where n is the number of samples required; and (3)

get the altitude of a set of points.

Figure 12 illustrates an invocation of Web

service for calculating the profile of a set of points.

Figure 12: Google Web Service Elevation.

Figure 13 presents an application of this service,

where appears the bike path and the elevation in

meters.

Figure 13: Example of a Bike Path with the Elevation in

Meters (Top of Figure).

6 DATA INTEGRATION

External data of Public transportation, Parking

Places availability and location and points of interest

(POI) are merged with public transportation, car and

bike sharing information. Traffic in real time

information is available from road concessionaries,

but outside these organizations, the access to this

information is most of times denied. We propose an

XML file is an approach of future data integration

from different source providers.

6.1 Looking POI with Guidance

The user of Integra System can: (1) get directions;

(2) Points of Interest (POI); (3) get

recommendations on his journey using public

IntegraSystem

transportation.

After user login (authentication), there is a menu

where the driver selects which operation he wants to

make; this is organized as Figure 14 (left side). If he

wants to know possible interest places, from

Recommendations tab Places, he has the screen

shown in Figure 14 (right side). The user defines

which region the system should consider introducing

the geographic center and radius, which can be

obtained using GPS or an address. Pressing the

button Get recommendations are obtained, and in

this case the user wants to know Points of Interest

(POI) near Seixal, in Portugal, considering a radius

of 2 km. At the bottom of the screen the user will

find the recommendations identified by the name

and address of the location of interest. The user can

get more information about the location of interest

selected by pressing the Info option from the menu.

Figure 14: Main Application Screen and Search for POI

(Points of Interest).

Figure 15: Screen for POI (Points of Interest).

Figure 15 shows the screens to identify a POI.

Information from a point of interest is constituted by

its name, address, latitude, longitude, brief

description, associated categories, hours of operation

and a display picture. In the user classification menu

option, the user can rate the point of interest in order

to help future recommendations to himself and to

other users.The screen lets you annotate/classify the

site of interest, with a degree of satisfaction, such as

"Good." The following Figure 16 (left side)

represents the screen. If the user wants help

geographically he can access it from Map menu to

display the selected site of interest, as is visible in

the Figure 16 (right side). The site contains an

identifier of interest (in this case is A), and in this

screen the user has the ability to navigate the map, as

well as zoom in and zoom out. In the menu he can

change the map type view (Hybrid, Roadmap, and

Satellite).

Figure 16: Visualization and Classification of POI.

Figure 17: Get POI (Points of Interest) and get directions

of Interest).

If he does not like the recommendations generated,

he can always get all the sites in a given area by

WEBIST2013-9thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies

accessing the item in the Places tab View. This

screen is similar to the screen that lets the user get

recommendations of sights, but this one shows all

the sites in a given region with the possibility of

filtering according to the categories of places of

interest, as shown in Figure 17 (left side). After the

user selects possible sites of interest to visit during

the holidays, he needs to know which route to use in

order to visit this place of interest. The screen is in

the following Figure 17 (right side).

6.2 Public Transportation Data

Integration

Information on public transport is available to the

system in the form of an XML file that contains

position information of the geographic locations of

the transports stops (result of data integration

process). The recommendation system submits the

items collection of items for the

PublicTransportService that identifies each item to

its proximity to an interface with public transport. If

yes, the property nearPublicTransport item is placed

with the value of one. The connection to an

information system is made by public transport

component PublicTransportAdapter, see (Ferreira et

al., 2011a).

6.3 Parking Places

The booking parking places is based on a system for

management of reserves (Sistema para Gestão de

Reservas - SGR), that allows driver’s mobile devices

to communicate and performs reservations. To

communicate with the SGR should be used a

technology that allows synchronous communication.

The Integra system is prepared to communicate with

the SGR with a WebService. The SGR responds to

mobile device communication response with a

reservation confirmation, or with a warning

indicating the unavailability parking slots. One of

the issues that arise when proposing an SGR is the

possibility of drivers failed to attend on time (or

even did not show) to a reserve performed. The SGR

must implement mechanisms to minimize the impact

of slots are being reserved, and then run out by

failure of the driver. One possible solution is to

implement a scoring system, which penalizes drivers

with one point in their record when they fail to

reserve a charging slot. When the driver reaches

three points, equivalent to three failures, the driver

has to go to an operator and try to reactivate his/her

access to the SGR.

The diagram in Figure 18 illustrates how the

SGR can be implemented with a system of penalty

points. The information is centralized in the SGR,

communicating with all operators, which also allows

the exchange of information on penalty points,

making the system more efficient. The SGR is

prepared to follow a business model that is

implemented with a slot reversion, failures penalties

and a waiting of reservations of 5 minutes

(administrator configurable time). The same

approach and software module is used for parking

places reservation.

Figure 18: SGR Penalty Points to Avoid User Reservation

Failures.

7 TRANSPORTATION BEST

ROUTE ADVICE

Integra System, can give the best advice in terms of

a diversity of options: public transportation from

several operators, car and bike sharing system, see

Figure 19.The system can be configured to give the

faster option to go from point A to B. This could

imply a mixture of options. Also best advice could

be the cheapest option.

All public transportation data (to the Lisbon

area) were exported to a graph, where the arc length

is defined by the time that it takes to go from one

node arc to the other. The same procedure is applied

for car sharing, POI and bike sharing systems. With

all information in a graph, the best path algorithm,

described in (Ferreira et al., 2011a), can be applied.

The big issue is the matrix size that could increase a

lot with a large diversity of options, and could

generate computer memory problems on handling

this matrix. Some heuristics were defined to speed

up this process. The arc weight can be constructed

from a diversity of options, time, price and C0

IntegraSystem

emissions. Next Sections explores this issue from a

perspective of a green policy.

Figure 19: Integra Transportation Best Advice.

Also this integrated approach of a diversity of

systems, with geographic information, could be

important for transportation planners or to political

decisions regarding transportation. The main idea is

to adapt arc weight to a combination of items that

could reflect an environment policy. Arc node

reflects time, price and CO

emission price and a

good investigation topic is to find the best

combination between time, price and CO

emissions

price, in order to define the ‘best’ weight of arc path.

This weight could also include a parameter function

of city traffic conditions (overload paths should be

more penalized). The system has potential to work

and deal with different source diversity. This idea is

materialized in a final year project at ISEL

(Marques, 2011). Different approaches can be

integrated in arc weight calculation: time, price, and

a weight related with CO

emissions.

8 CONCLUSIONS

The focus on this work is aligned with the

“Integra Concept” (http://www.start-project.eu/en/

Integra.aspx), whose aim is to provide a single brand

that links together and provides information on the

different public transport operators across the

Atlantic regions. The queries and answers to them

should reflect a single data model. The existence of

this common data model takes the software

applications with the difficult task of dealing with

several technologies and their data schemas.

Different public transportation systems can be added

from the end user point of view. Also, this

integration allows the creation of mobile systems

oriented for tourism purposes. Another main goal of

Integra is to provide guidance to “low budget

tourism”, helping tourists to reach POI (Points of

Interest) by public transportation.

Integra System is based on a emergent approach

the “cooperative transportation infrastructure

integration”, by providing the driver with a

collaborative holistic approach of different public

transportation infrastructure sources that can be

combined with real traffic information (not

described in this work, see (Ferreira et al., 2011a),

parking places, to support the driver decision-

making process or motive the usage of Public

transportation.

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