• AODOS_blog2


It’s Monday morning and you are in your car, driving on Attiki Odos, trying to get to a very important meeting you cannot be late for. You have your Frontier App activated, where you have entered your destination and, as you are driving, you get a “nudge” from the app: “Heavy traffic between junctions 9 and 12.  Alternative option: use Doukissis Plakentias P+R and take the metro to reach your destination (availability of parking spaces confirmed)”. You decide to act on the app’s recommendation, exit at Doukissis Plakentias interchange, part your car at the Park&Ride and proceed to make the rest of your trip by Metro, arriving for your meeting on time. You hear on the news later that delays on the motorway exceeded 30 minutes, which meant that deciding to respond to the Frontier nudge helped you get to your destination on time and with less hassle…

Does this seem like something that would help you? Do you often wish you had access to this type of information about delays and events on motorways and public transport while you are travelling on a specific corridor? This is what FRONTIER is aiming for: a traffic management system that consists of AI tools that support the implementation of automated applications across all actors involved, with proactive decision support methodologies and tools and a “personalised nudge engine” that will generate recommendations and nudges and will communicate them to travellers to assist them in their travel. FRONTIER will also offer supply-demand optimisation tools for proactive traffic management that integrates machine learning and traffic simulation to provide decision-making support, along with traffic estimation and prediction techniques using connected vehicle data. In other words, with the FRONTIER app, you will get consolidated information from all transport modes that are available to you to reach your destination at any given time with safety and reliability and making the best use of multimodality.

Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece. The Athens FRONTIER pilot will be featuring the deployment of the FRONTIER platform along a motorway corridor of Attiki Odos and key interchange points with links to urban multimodal infrastructure. Attiki Odos is a modern 70 km-long urban motorway, connecting the airport with the Athens city centre, while also linked to major urban arteries and intercity motorways. The Athens Urban Transport Organization (OASA) operates several lines traversing Attiki Odos with a number of bus stops, while Attiko Metro (AMETRO) operates three metro lines, one of which connects to Attiki Odos and connects to the airport.

Currently, the different parties managing the multimodal network in Athens operate in isolation, thus there is a lack of technical and organisational interfaces in achieving multimodal network management. This restricts full visibility of the network status by different actors and thus hampers the deployment of holistic response plans for resolving inefficiencies on the network. With FRONTIER, all involved parties are expecting this to change.

The first pilot test for Athens is being planned at the moment and will take place in June 2023, where more than 40 participants will be able to receive the much-anticipated nudges of FRONTIER while travelling on the specified corridor by bus, metro or car. So watch this space for the results!

(Image: from picture by N.Daniilidis)