'Smart' City to get smarter with Xerox

Dubai, United Arab Emirates – April 20 2015 – Every day, millions of commuters buy and use tickets, creating massive amounts of data about daily transportation habits. Xerox recently introduced an analytics platform that analyses this anonymous data quickly and accurately and presents the information with user-friendly graphics, making it easy for transport and parking operators to better understand and even predict commuter needs.

Xerox’s new Mobility Analytics Platform (MAP) provides a new city-wide picture of transportation operations including, adherence to schedules, passenger-loading levels and car park utilisation rates.

Using data analytics algorithms and visualization technology from the Xerox Research Centre Europe, it can predict, for example, where passengers will alight and the impact of varying factors such as running ahead or behind schedule and the weather.

"MAP gives operators the keys to improving the quality and adoption of services,” said Jo van Onsem, group president, International Public Sector, Xerox. "Xerox’s MAP innovation is a major contribution to the development of improved urban mobility.”

The Australian city of Adelaide, which has embarked on a 30-year urban development plan, is piloting MAP to improve its public transport services by analysing people flows between different sectors of the city.

And VINCI Park, the world’s leading parking space provider, is testing the system in Neuilly, a town in the western suburbs of Paris, where it manages on- and off-street parking. The operator is using MAP to better understand how its off-street car parks are used. In a second step, this parking information will be combined with MAP’s advanced customer profiling features to predict future demand for parking, inform VINCI Park on how to modify prices, identify when extra access lanes are required or even where new car parks should be created.

“With MAP we now have a user friendly graphical tool that allows us to analyse quickly and accurately the use and revenues of our car parks,” said Albert Feuga, director, Parking Management System, VINCI Park. “MAP also allows us to understand the behaviour of our customers and better anticipate demand and manage flows.”

Availability

MAP is available immediately in all geographies except North America. Future enhancements to MAP, available later in 2015, will enable the platform to run simulations and estimate the outcome of changing routes, providing new services or introducing dynamic fare structures.