Mobility as a Service (MaaS) presents a unique opportunity for governments across Australia to create safer, more sustainable and liveable cities. By delivering smarter transportation services that focus on the user-experience, communities and tourists benefit from safer, more convenient, and more personalised travel experiences.
The vision of MaaS is to provide users with the end-to-end travel experience, connecting multiple forms of transport with booking, payment and account management. While the concept of MaaS is relatively mature, the application of this technology in Australia is still in its infancy, providing opportunities to governments and councils, transport service providers, OEMS and enterprise. Most importantly, MaaS will transform the travel experience for the user.
For MaaS to deliver on its promise, and for governments and communities to realise its benefits, these systems need to operate at scale with potential to power millions of journeys each day. Just as critical is how these systems perform under pressure to support crises or large events, such as News Year’s Eve when hundreds of thousands of people gather to watch fireworks in a city centre.
While policy and education will play a part in mass adoption, if these systems do not perform or meet user expectation, they will fail. To succeed, MaaS systems need to be agile and dynamic – responding to both user demand and load.
Current environment
Today in Australia MaaS systems and applications are commonly deployed as temporary pilot projects or with a focus on a specific mode of transport.
Transport for NSW’s digital opal card trial gave 10,000 users access to an app that can be used to plan, book and pay for both public and private modes of transport. Queensland’s ODIN PASS trial tested the idea of tailored journeys, including the option to take the most ‘environmentally friendly’ route. And Intelematics’ recent trial with Merri-bek Council, in partnership with Lug + Carrie, allowed users to plan safer bike journeys using the ridePlan app – part of the Omniway MaaS platform.
Trials like this demonstrate the power of MaaS to influence behaviour and encourage more active forms of transport, but the leap from supporting select groups of users to much larger populations – across entire cities or states – requires much deeper consideration and investment.
MaaS on a bigger scale
For MaaS to perform at scale it needs to be built for scale. This requires an agile, user-centric approach applied to both planning and platform design.
MaaS at scale requires a unique infrastructure which can deliver data and the best user experience at speed – irrespective of demand. The infrastructure needs to be of industry standard and utilise best practice architecture to enable the flexible and efficient use of an abundance of internal and external data feeds. These feeds may include live traffic data, weather data, parking data, as well as transport schedules.
Cloud infrastructure provides the most agile host environment for MaaS – allowing storage and data to be scaled up or down in response to demand. It also enables speed to be maintained whether there is one user or one million.
Similarly, data storage impacts speed with NoSQL databases providing the best platform to date to support fast-paced MaaS environments – when compared to more pedestrian relational database management systems.
Auto scaling is also critical for MaaS at scale and allows systems to keep pace with both user traffic and loads from high-intensity processing, which is required for features like journey planning.
Equally important is understanding the needs of the user now, and into the future. A user must be able to access all available transport modalities on one application. This may include a mixture of public and private mobility operators and transport companies – all with different pricings and conditions of service.
Each provider will have their own unique data sets, but this complexity should be presented simply and cohesively or risk users finding alternative tools.
Conclusion
At Intelematics we build our applications for scale and performance using multilayer architecture designed to provide an end-to-end multi-modal journey planning solution. The nature of this infrastructure means we are prepared for increases in usage even during a peak. It is predictable and can be planned for.
Our MaaS platform Omniway features: Multi-modal journey planning, real-time public transport and scheduling, bike riding path categorisation, turn-by-turn voice navigation, and more.
Before partnering with a MaaS platform provider, it is important to consider both the principles and infrastructure that will power your strategy and solution. MaaS providers need to find the right balance between data integrity, speed and optimal CX under all conditions.
Want to learn more about our MaaS solutions and futureproofing for scale?
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