The contribution of open big data sources and analytics tools to sustainable urban mobility

Abstract

Sustainable urban mobility is one of the top priorities in European Union and worldwide, as there is an intense tendency of population density increase in urban areas, which results in traffic, economic, environmental and societal impacts. To allocate smart solutions and address successfully urban mobility, communities need to build awareness and knowledge on the demand for people’s mobility and goods transportation, as well as to develop appropriate tools to manage and assess transportation system performance. The above, raise the necessity of data availability. In the era of rapid technological development and endless production of data, electronic devices, including smartphones, personal computers, autonomous vehicles, GPS (Global Positioning System), SDR (Software-defined radio) devices and Bluetooth, have become sources of big data. Urban mobility is a sector that could benefit from using big data by understanding, analyzing and processing data to manage traffic, predict demand, affect travelers’ choices and assess level of service. The purpose of this paper is to identify and review available open big data sources, big data tools and transport related applications in European and international transport platforms. Collected information is used to formulate a roadmap of available and open big data sources, open big data processing tools and applications which aim at improving urban mobility. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.