Behavioural Change Support Intelligent Transportation Applications

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners to participate in exploring behavioral change support intelligent transportation applications. We welcome submissions that explore intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which interact with travelers in order to persuade them or nudge them towards sustainable transportation behaviors and decisions. Emerging opportunities including the use of data and information generated by ITS and users' mobile devices in order to render personalized, contextualized and timely transport behavioral change interventions are in our focus. We invite submissions and ideas from domains of ITS including, but not limited to, multi-modal journey planners, advanced traveler information systems and in-vehicle systems. The expected outcome will be a deeper understanding of the challenges and future research directions with respect to behavioral change support through ITS.Comment: Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) 2017 Worksho

Human capital and performance appraisal in the public sector: An empirical investigation from employees’ and senior managers’ perspective

Human capital is often considered as one of the most fundamental requirements for high organizational performance, whereas key driver for the achievement of higher levels of employees' productivity is considered the employment of a suitable performance appraisal system. Based on this perspective, we assume that every organization needs to establish an effective appraisal system which will be sufficient to facilitate employees’ continuous development. This is especially relevant for public sector organizations that in some countries implement fundamentally flawed performance appraisal systems. On the verge of the transition from the bureaucratic to the new public management model, the organizational units of the public sector seem to have an excellent opportunity to redesign their key processes, including human capital appraisal forms. This paper explores the context and role of a few critical human capital practices, which are mainly related to employees’ self-evaluation and performance appraisal, and are currently implemented in the Greek public sector. To attain our goal, an empirical investigation was conducted via a questionnaire survey to specifically determine whether self-evaluation and appraisal problems exist, in particular in terms of objectivity, consistency, adequacy, and credibility. The questionnaires were addressed both to employees and senior managers. The empirical results obtained, highlight some core problems that the public sector faces, with regard to existing self-evaluation systems and appraisal practices. These, among others, include the following: a lack of objectivity both in employees’ self-evaluation and in their appraisals assessed by the senior managers; inconsistencies between the way the public servants perceive the range and quality of their merits and those included in their job description; mistrust and lack of reliability on employees’ evaluation reports and selection criteria. Finally, some policy reformations are proposed to cope with these problems

Heuristic-based journey planner for mobility as a service (Maas)

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310140The continuing growth of urbanisation poses a real threat to the operation of transportation services in large metropolitan areas around the world. As a response, several initiatives that promote public transport and active travelling have emerged in the last few years. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is one such initiative with the main goal being the provision of a holistic urban mobility solution through a single interface, the MaaS operator. The successful implementation of MaaS requires the support of a technology platform for travellers to fully benefit from the offered transport services. A central component of such a platform is a journey planner with the ability to provide trip options that efficiently integrate the different modes included in a MaaS scheme. This paper presents a heuristic that implements a scenario-based journey planner for users of MaaS. The proposed heuristic provides routes composed of different modes including private cars, public transport, bike-sharing, car-sharing and ride-hailing. The methodological approach for the generation of journeys is explained and its implementation using a microservices architecture is presented. The implemented system was trialled in two European cities and the analysis of user satisfaction results reveal good overall performance.This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant number No 723176. And the APC was funded by the European Commission.Published versio

MultiModal route planning in mobility as a service

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by ACM in Proceedings 2019 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence Workshops (WI 2019 Companion) in October 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1145/3358695.3361843 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a new approach for multimodal transportation in smart cities which refers to the seamless integration of various forms of transport services accessible through one single digital platform. In a MaaS environment there can be a multitude of multi modal options to reach a destination which are derived from combinations of available transport services. Terefore, route planning functionalities in the MaaS era need to be able to generate multi-modal routes using constraints related to a user's modal allowances, service provision and limited user preferences (e.g. mode exclusions) and suggest to the traveller the routes that are relevant for specific trips as well as aligned to her/his preferences. In this paper, we describe an architecture for a MaaS multi-modal route planner which integrates i) a dynamic journey planner that aggregates unimodal routes from existing route planners (e.g. Google directions or Here routing), enriches them with innovative mobility services typically found in MaaS schemes, and converts them to multimodal options, while considering aspects of transport network supply and ii) a route recommender that filters and ranks the available routes in an optimal manner, while trying to satisfy travellers' preferences as well as requirements set by the MaaS operator (e.g. environmental friendliness of the routes or promotion of specific modes of transport).Published versio

From mobility patterns to behavioural change: leveraging travel behaviour and personality profiles to nudge for sustainable transportation

Rendering transport behaviours more sustainable is a pressing issue of our times. In this paper, we rely on the deep penetration of mobile phones in order to influence citizens’ behavior through data-driven mobility and persuasive profiles. Our proposed approach aims to nudge users on a personalized level in order to change their mobility behavior and make more sustainable choices. To achieve our goal, first we leverage pervasive mobile sensing to uncover users’ mobility patterns and use of transportation modes. Second, we construct users’ persuadability profiles by considering their personality and mobility behavior. With the use of the aforementioned information we generate personalized interventions that nudge users to adopt sustainable transportation habits. These interventions rely on persuasive technologies and are embedded in a route planning application for smartphones. A pilot study with 30 participants using the system for 6 weeks provided fairly positive evaluation results in terms of the acceptance of our approach and revealed instances of behavioural change. Document type: Articl

COBRA framework to evaluate e-government services: A citizen-centric perspective

E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a new quantitative analysis framework consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) by analogy to the well-known SWOT qualitative analysis framework. The COBRA measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm that COBRA framework is a useful approach for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective and it can be generalised to other perspectives and measurement contexts. Crown Copyright © 2014.PIAP-GA-2008-230658) from the European Union Framework Program and another grant (NPRP 09-1023-5-158) from the Qatar National Research Fund (amember of Qatar Foundation