What would it take to travel across Europe by rail—seamlessly, sustainably, and affordably? In this first episode of...
The European Railcast – A Single European Railway Area: why and how EU-Rail contributes?
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Building a European multimodal transport system starts with interoperable backend services
While trains, planes, and autonomouscars dominate the multimodal transport discussion, the system can’t function without the right backend services and tools.
Real-time information platforms, booking apps, secure payment systems, and user interfaces streamline the different stepsand modes of a multimodal trip.
Developing these backend services and tools is the Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking.
A portfolio of multimodal services
All the developed services and solutions were designed to be interoperable, cover all transport modes,
and be compatible with existing legacy solutions.
Interoperability framework: allows for more efficient interconnection between heterogeneous systems.
Travel shopping: a single marketplace that brings together all retail operations relevant to the multimodal journey.
Booking and ticketing: unifies how the rights to travel (i.e. entitlements) are specified and used across all modes of transport.
Trip tracking: notifies passengers about any foreseen difficulties in their journey and offers alternative solutions and/or re-booking options.
Business analytics: provides a common business intelligence foundation to generate and monitor data from across the transport ecosystem.
Your travel companion
The Travel Companion is an innovative solution that combines various modes of transport from different cities and even countries into a single platform where users can plan, pay, implement, and follow their travels in an easy and convenient manner.
The latest release of the Travel Companion allows for group travelling, includes tools that travel service providers can use to add their own offer(s), introduces mobility packages and soft modes, and integrates ride-sharing and other demand-responsive transport options. It also features faster response times and more user flexibility.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated that this is technically feasible using IT semantic interoperability to build future services and solutions that not only empower the traveller to manage a seamless, door-to-door multimodal journey, they also place rail at the centre of the multimodal ecosystem.
Who benefits
With the proposed services and solutions in hand, infrastructure managers, railway operators, suppliers, and final users are now better positioned than ever to make a European-wide multimodal system a reality.
Infrastructure managers
Railway operators
Suppliers
Final users
Did You Know?
Although not every tool and solution developed by Europe’s Rail are completely new, they all go wellbeyond the capabilities of any existing solution.
Fast Fact
Technical details about the Travel Companion’s architecture, along with
detailed descriptions of its use cases, have been consolidated into an opensource solution available here.
Key Finding
Successfully deploying multimodal services at scale and across Member States requires the support of a European regulatory framework.