6 May 2024
Data governance: the mobility sector is increasingly sorting its data
The tourism industry has already largely solved the problem. Regardless of whether customers book their package tour online or at a travel agency: When searching for offers, not only is the same "Traveltainment" database largely accessed. More and more tour operators who feed their offers into the database are now also providing their information in the same data format - the Open Tourism Data Standard (OTDS). An association has even been founded, supported by large sections of the tourism industry, to ensure that OTDS becomes established throughout the industry.
The mobility sector is still a long way from such orderly conditions. Whether in sales, telematics or operations - data is also used there, sometimes even in large quantities. However, cross-company approaches to managing information centrally and using it more efficiently than before are only just beginning to emerge. Isolated solutions are still widespread in the transport sector. This is despite the fact that the EU called for standardization back in 2017: In a regulation, it obliged all member states to create so-called National Access Points (NPS), central locations through which electronic data from public and individual transport systems can be made available.
Deutsche Bahn (DB) recognized the benefits of data governance even before the EU regulation. The rail group adopted the "DB2020+" strategy. A key component of the offensive was and is the renewal of customer information systems at stations, on trains and in mobile platforms.
The hardware and software landscape of DB's customer information systems is still partly characterized by historically grown isolated solutions. This means that different systems can only communicate with each other to a limited extent. The result: high latency times, which can lead to passengers finding different data in the DB Navigator app than on the displays at the station - on track changes, connections or changed carriage rows, for example.In the meantime, DB has created a central traveler information platform to establish a single point of truth. "The development of the RI platform is progressing very well," says Deutsche Bahn. However, not all stand-alone systems within the Group have yet been replaced. For example, the RI platform does not yet supply any data to the LCD displays of the S-Bahn systems.
However, other players in the mobility sector are also working on data governance. As part of a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, the IP/IT & data protection team at BDO Legal Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft mbH, for example, addressed the issue of legally compliant access to and use of vehicle data. The aim of the project was to read data from local public transport buses with climate-neutral drive systems and use AI to gain insights into how to optimize their use, in particular the charging behaviour of electric buses, employee training and predictive vehicle maintenance. The results of the study should be transferable to the rail industry. However: "Efforts towards industry-wide standardization - especially on the part of the manufacturers - have so far been rather sluggish," wrote Matthias Niebuhr, specialist lawyer for IT law, and Victor Nellißen, lawyer at BDO Legal Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft, in an article for the trade magazine bahn manager.
Siemens Mobility, exhibitor at IT-TRANS 2024, has founded the digital business platform Xcelerator to accelerate such processes. The idea is for participants to open up their interfaces for data exchange. The aim is to create a powerful ecosystem of partners who work together to advance the digital transformation and sustainability of mobility.
According to Siemens Mobility, the platform has developed successfully since Xcelerator was founded in June 2022. Within the first year alone, the number of connected partners has risen to 96, according to the company, including companies such as AWS, Daimler Truck, SAP, IBM, NTT Data, Cellforce, Microsoft and Bentley, Siemens announced. Among other things, they are working on solutions that help with battery production or predictive maintenance. The Xcelerator partners are all active in the mobility sector. However, there is still a long way to go before there is a National Access Point, as envisioned by the EU for the business sector – and before there will be orderly conditions such as in the tourism industry.