An der schönen blauen Donau (By the Beautiful Blue Danube)

[RomanH2]

Summary (~100 words)

Water and rail transport are more efficient than road transport in terms of CO2 emissions (Worldshipping). Nonetheless, road transport still accounts for more than 75% of freight transport in Europe (EC statistics).

Is there a way for European waterways and railways to be more used?
Through this challenge, participants would explore new routes that will leverage those modes of transport more. To that end, the following challenges are envisioned:

• first, uniformization of information spread in public databases about European waterways and railways has to be explored,
• second, a routing software would be augmented taking into account specifics of intermodal freight transport and multiple factors (such as time, cost and CO2 emissions), to allow for the visibility of data about those new routes/or other existing routes for which information is not easily accessible.

Key issues to questions to answer/investigate

• How can existing routes be assessed and new routes discovered that allow relying more on waterways and railways in Europe?
• Cost function design: what are the different parameters the routing software can optimize for (examples: time, cost, fuel/CO2, risk, ETA confidence, ...)
  • Can we reroute some part of traffic to improve road fluidity? How would this increase transport efficiency?
• How can stakeholders be incentivized to rely more on those two modes of transport compared to road?
• Can the data structure be used in such a way that intermodal routing can be intuitively implemented? What data format would be better suited?
• (Secondary) Provide a tool to allow for automatic identification of high-traffic areas (cities, ports, roads,..) in which more infrastructures would be needed.

Required knowledge and skills

• Data management (database engineering skills are a plus, but not required).
• Graph theory basics (pathfinding algorithm) and optimization algorithms.
• Basic software engineering skills (demo, access to data and improving existing routing algorithms).
• General idea about different stakeholders involved in intermodal freight.

Offered datasets

• [access: public] INSPIRE datasets.
• TO BE CONFIRMED [access: public] Selected subset from Danube Reference Data and Service Infrastructure.
• TO BE CONFIRMED [access: public] Selected subset from RWS.
• [access: private APIs, only for the purpose of the challenge] Real-time data collected by our IoT intermodal container.

Other relevant datasets

• [access: public, ODbL license] OpenStreetMaps.
• [access: public, ODbL license] Global Roads Inventory Project.
• [access: public] Bluebook database.

New technologies to test or evaluate

TBD (wetransform).

Offered personal resources

• 1 day/week support.
• preferred ways of communication: Slack channel and Github repository (issue tracker).
• 1h weekly Q&A sessions videocalls.

Offered or suggested tools

Open source routing software: GraphHopper, Navit, OpenSourceRoutingMachine, PyrouteLib, … (a more exhaustive list can be provided).

Desired outcome and presentation

• Demo routing software -- preferred deliverable by web services.
• Corridors discovery, with focus on waterways.

Offered benefits for the teams

TBD

Background & context

• The challenge is about exploring the efficiency of intermodal transport in Europe.
• The solution can have an impact on the environment, by providing people with more visibility on routes that may be more efficient in terms of fuel consumption. Consequently CO2 emission can be decreased.
• DRDSI has been created to implement INSPIRE on data from Danube countries.

Cooperation with other Challenge Partners

• Are you interested in hosting your challenge together with one or more of the other challenge partners or submitting a common proposal? yes!
• If requested, are you able to provide access to your offered datasets, APIs or tools for a challenge proposed by another submitter? yes!

Submitting organisations

• AELER (Roman Heimgartner)
• WeTransform (Thorsten Reitz)
• Contact point: [email protected]