Overview

DMLL is a gamification partner in the Crowd4Roads (C4Rs) project - an innovative initiative combining smart sensing, ride sharing and gamification applications to harness collective intelligence for providing open data towards boosting traffic conditions on the continent. The C4Rs project (7 partners, 3 years, worth over €1.5 million) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 687959. Crowd4Roads (C4Rs) stands for Crowd Sensing and Ride Sharing for Road Sustainability.

Goals

The goal is to engage end-users, i.e. car drivers and passengers, in making road transport more sustainable by exploiting two emerging grassroots initiatives that have proven effective: BlaBlaCar, a trip sharing initiative that increases car occupancy rate, and SmartRoadSense, a crowd sensing system that exploits smartphones to collect accurate data on road conditions.

The official website: http://c4rs.eu

Technology Application

The project will exploit the following applications:

BlaBlaCar (http://bablacar.com/) is a trusted ridesharing system creating a match between passengers who need to travel and drivers with empty seats in their cars. Passengers who take a ride pay to the driver the agreed contribution to share travel expenses. BlaBlaCar is the largest trip sharing community worldwide, with more than 25.000.000 members in 22 countries.

SmartRoadSense (http://smartroadsense.it/) is an innovative crowd sensing system, which makes use of the accelerometers of car-mounted smartphones to estimate the roughness of the road surface. Roughness estimates are then collected by a server, aggregated, reported on a map, and released as open data. SmartRoadSense has been developed by the University of Urbino and by NeuNet cultural association in the last three years and it has been released in Italy on February 21, 2015. In the first month of activity the surface roughness has been automatically monitored on about 10,000 Km of roads, corresponding to more than 1% of the total Italian road network.

The combination of the BlaBlaCar and SmartRoadSense initiatives into the Crowd4Roads platform is expected to trigger a network effect that adds to the popularity and speeds up the adoption rate of both of them. DMLL is leading the gamification design task aiming to enhance user experience and Marche Region will host the solution into its cloud data centre, to provide scalability even for broader exploitation scenarios. Collectively, these initiatives are expected to provide a direct benefit both by inducing more sustainable and greener car usage patterns and by raising end-users’ awareness on the conditions of the roads they travel. Moreover, they will harness collective intelligence to provide open data on the road conditions supporting better informed planning of road maintenance.

Consortium

Project Timeline: