Towards an integrated multimodal transportation dashboard

Many sophisticated Information Systems (IS) fo- cusing on management and supervision problems in the trans- portation arena exist in the contemporary world. Road traffic management systems, rail traffic management systems and many more are here to face everyday challenges. However, in spite of a huge progress in this area, systems that combine multiple transport modes for management purposes are a very few. This article proposes a solution for the monitoring of the operational state of multimodal transportation systems in a single dashboard. The experimental solution is applied to the transport network of the city of Porto, Portugal, as a case study. The problem includes such major components as (1) input information and its sources, (2) model (metrics, calculation algorithms) and (3) visualization metaphors. A proposed solution is a dashboard that provides a comprehensive view on the operational state, or Level of Service (LOS), of transportation systems of different types. Such a system is expected to become an essential tool for transport system mon- itoring and management, supplying the necessary information for strategic and emergency planning to the authorities and other decision makers in the sector. address the above issues specifically for the ITSs used in the city of Porto, Portugal. Our aim was first of all to study the possibility of providing a global view on the whole transportation network of any scale and type, in order to monitor its transportation systems at different levels of abstraction and evaluate their operational state based on that of the elements and subsystems they include, as well as the operational state of the transportation network as a whole. In order to achieve this aim, we have developed an hierarchical model of LOS evaluation inspired by the concept of ontology. For testing purpose we have implemented a prototype of the dashboard that combines the LOS measures of different transport modes and detail level and permits LOS analysis at different geographic scale: the entire monitored zone, its areas and sub-areas. To make that possible, it was necessary to identify the protocols and other sources supplying data related to LOS for different transport means (aviation, road, waterborne, railway) in a real-time mode. Besides that, a study has been performed to identify and define the metrics, as well as their scale for the evaluation of LOS of each transport system and respective subsystems. The result of the research that has been carried out and the prototype architecture are described in this paper.