Together with partners, Fraunhofer IESE is developing a B2B service platform for Mobility as a Service and is implementing it by way of example in the cities of Aachen and Kiel.
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Already today, some major cities and regions in Germany offer their passengers the option of switching between different means of transportation via an app. In some cases, services such as carsharing, e-scooters, or rental bicycles are already networked with the respective public transport system, but the integration into a system encompassing various public transport associations is missing. In order to bundle mobility offers in the sense of a Digital Ecosystem, Fraunhofer IESE is collaborating with partners in the research project Smart MaaS (Mobility as a Service) to develop an open, modular, and service-oriented B2B platform through which mobility is offered as a smart service.
This enables both established and up-and-coming companies from the mobility industry to combine their offerings. The aim is for passengers to get from door to door with the best possible and fastest connection.
In Smart MaaS, the service platform is being implemented by way of an example in cities such as Aachen and Kiel for testing purposes. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in the technology program “Smart Service World II”.
In Smart MaaS, Fraunhofer IESE contributes, in particular, its competence in the conception and design of Digital Ecosystems. For this purpose, we follow a comprehensive modeling methodology that, on the one hand, flexibly addresses the requirements and constraints of the mobility industry and, on the other hand, takes into account the different aspects of an ecosystem. Relevant decisions and core activities provide the framework for the design, e.g., the definition of the ecosystem actors, the business strategy, the required technical infrastructure, the openness strategy, as well as the implementation of the business strategy in services and applications.
In the business strategy, value flows, dependencies among services, contractual relationships, and money flows are taken into account, while the openness strategy determines the exchange of information between the partners and the openness of the ecosystem for new partners.
Once the contributions of the individual ecosystem partners have been defined and aligned, Fraunhofer IESE evaluates the overall concept. In doing so, both the value of the ecosystem for all involved stakeholders and the consistency of the decisions made are examined.
The concept of a Digital Ecosystem for MaaS on the basis of the B2B platform enables companies from the mobility sector to build on the applications of the respective other platform participants. This allows new business models to be created on an ongoing basis. The platform allows previously largely isolated data to be securely networked and marketed as standard-compliant web services.
All important information is contained in the developed concept and can be further processed and implemented by software architects, contract departments, or product management.
This is what Dr. Karina Villela, Project Manager Smart MaaS at Fraunhofer IESE, has to say:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE