Demand-oriented and shared mobility offers are seen as an opportunity for the traffic turnaround. They have already existed for several decades, e.g., as call-sharing cabs or on-call buses. Nevertheless, they represent only a small part of public transport so far. Due to the spread of smartphones, mobile booking systems and modern routing algorithms, Mobility on Demand (MOD) providers have been able to establish themselves a little more in recent years, at least in some major cities.
Unfortunately, the modern concepts do not yet show a good interface to the rest of the public transport system, so that transfers to and from timed transport lines are associated with waiting times. In addition, only a very small proportion of passengers leave their private cars for this purpose.
BESTMOD addresses these challenges with the following approach. A hybrid on-demand service, which on the one hand offers a reliably short transfer to the existing public transport infrastructure in a timed manner and on the other hand travels efficiently, without a fixed predefined route, area-wide and demand-oriented to any destination.
Using publicly available data sources and a mobility survey, a database is being created from which a digital twin of Krefeld's mobility is being created. Many foundation courses for this have already been developed in the "MobilitätsWerkStadt 2025" project, which was completed in 2021, sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and carried out jointly with SWK Mobil.
With the help of modern optimization methods, scenarios are to be calculated in which the costs of expanding public transportation with on-demand services can even be covered by the expected increase in customers in the optimal case.
