Press Release
EU Project peacox Helps Plan Eco-Friendly Trips with Comfort
ICT Research Initiative aims to tailor trips for each traveller
The European Commission is funding the project peacox – Persuasive Advisor for CO2-reducing cross-model trip planning, which is led by CURE – Center for Usability Research & Engineering, an independent Austrian research institute.
In our highly globalized world, mobility and transport are becoming increasingly important. This has a strong environmental impact, in particular in urban areas. A substantial part of emissions is related to traffic and mobility, and therefore it has become essential to support and guide users to behave in an ecologically responsible manner with regard to their travelling behaviour and decisions.
The project aims to provide travellers with personalised mobile and web tools that allow, help and persuade them to plan their travel in an environmentally friendly way. In order to support the users in making this decision without feeling restricted, it considers their situational and individual range of acceptable travel choices. Furthermore, the project facilitates eco-friendly driving behaviour by providing real-time feedback and instructions about driving. In this way peacox will contribute to achieving a significant reduction of the carbon footprint without reducing quality of life and comfort for travellers.
Eco-friendly Travel without Thinking
Peacox will develop mobile and web applications that enable users on the move and at home to easily plan and organize their trip, no matter if they walk by foot or use public transport, a motorcycle, car or bike. In order to convince and stimulate users in behaving in a more environmentally friendly way while travelling, it will enrich trip planning and information system with features like personalised travel recommendations, automated trip purpose identification, emission modelling as well as eco-friendly driving advice.
To achieve maximum impact, Peacox will provide situation- and location-based suggestions and information to users regarding travel choices and options. The calculation and presentation of options will take the current location of the users, their actual travel situation, their individual preferences as well as their travel mode choice and trip history into account.
It will reduce the need for explicit inputs by the user and thereby increase the user experience, comfort and desirability of use. Johann Schrammel, Senior Researcher at CURE and coordinator of the project, highlights the benefit of the expected results: “In contrast to existing trip planning and impact calculation services, Peacox automatically keeps track of the user’s prior travel decisions and tracks current travel decisions by use of GPS and automated travel mode detection. It identifies the current mode and purpose of a trip, and builds tailored models for each user.”
It calculates the carbon footprint of a user’s trip, taking into account the used means of transportation as well as dynamic variables influencing the actual emissions such as current traffic situation, and therefore can provide more accurate data than simplistic, static computation models. In addition to CO2, the model will also consider additional emissions such as NOX, SO2 and PM10. Based on this information the ecological and carbon footprint will be computed. This accurate calculation of the average ecological footprint enables the presentation of detailed and exact feedback to the travellers, thereby fostering the targeted behaviour change.
Furthermore, peacox will present relevant information for multi-modal trip planning. The system’s user interface will be designed in such a way as to guide the user to choose less polluting alternatives. To this end the design will utilise known psychological principles and strategies such as making the consequences of choices clearly visible during the decision process. Special care will be given during the design to focus on emotionally positive aspects rather than restrictive approaches.
Assembling the Appropriate Mix of Skills
CURE has set up a consortium composed of experienced, interdisciplinary experts in the needed areas of expertise, namely trip mode and purpose detection, detailed calculation of environmental impact and carbon emissions, human-computer interaction research, persuasive technology research and mobile and web application development. The project coordinator, Johann Schrammel, is confident that the project has all the ingredients needed for a successful EU project. He elaborates, “peacox’s objectives require support from multiple partners assembling the appropriate mix of skills. With this highly experienced project team we are convinced that we will reach the project’s objectives.”
All research and technology development activities are centred on user needs. The project coordinator, CURE, has long experience with the application of user-centred methods. This will ensure that Peacox's objectives stay aligned with user needs and that user-based requirements are specified in enough detail to be usable in the implementation phase. The Austrian software and design company Fluidtime are experts in the development of mobile and web applications in the context of real-time information, and additionally have very broad knowledge of involving users in the development phase. In cooperation with the Vienna Public Transport Service (Wiener Linien), Fluidtime have developed the highly popular mobile transport service application Qando.
ETH Zurich will contribute with expertise in the area of transportation research and will ensure that transportation modalities and purposes are identified by using available GPS and travel information data. Furthermore, they will provide their knowledge on transportation planning and data interfaces for transport information. ETHZ will work closely together with the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens. The ICCS are experts on user modelling, personalisation and adaptive interaction development.
The required expertise for estimating environmental impact is contributed by the Trinity College of Dublin (TCD), who will be responsible for the behavioural analysis, the emission and exposure modelling as well as the eco-driving model. TCD is especially experienced in the field of CO2 calculation and savings possibilities, as well as in the area of researching the reasons for travel mode choices.
Expertise from the navigation industry is represented by the global industry player TomTom and the Czech software enterprise Telematix. TomTom is the market leader for navigation software, used by over 45 million people every day. Telematix has also developed widely used navigation software called Dynavix. Telematix will be a strong contributor in terms of system design and implementation. Together with TomTom they are highly interested in making use of advanced research outcomes for future product development.
The Austrian Partner ITS Vienna Region will be responsible for providing traffic information data in Vienna, where field trials will be held.
For further information about the project please visit: http://www.project-peacox.eu
Project Facts
Project Title: Peacox: Persuasive Advisor for CO2-reducing cross-model trip planning.
Project Reference: 288466
Project Funding: Seventh Framework Programme, Area: Low-carbon multi-modal mobility and freight transport Future and Emerging Technologies (ICT-2011.6.6)
Total cost: 3.13 Million Euro
EU contribution: 2.35 Million Euro
Duration: 36 months (October 2011 – September 2014)
