Everything in one place

Last week saw the official launch of the City of Ghent’s mobility dashboard, a smart city project initiated and managed by Ghent’s innovative traffic management centre and powered by Waylay’s orchestration platform.

The mobility dashboard acts as a single point of information for the citizens of Ghent about everything related to their city’s traffic. It is a real-time visualization panel consisting of several data widgets displaying information on traffic flow, car and bike parking occupancy, bus and tram schedules and incidents, weather info and more. It has received high interest from the general public and media, as it addresses a key user problem: a fragmented experience when it comes to checking traffic information. Citizens need to search, find and then check multiple sources for different kinds of traffic info. The dashboard solves this problem by offering everything in one single view, one-click away.

Part of a broader smart mobility solution

The mobility dashboard is only one part of a three-faceted smart mobility solution powered by Waylay and made up of two citizen-facing applications and an alert-based fault management system that serves the traffic management staff members.

Next to the dashboard, the second citizen-facing app is a fully automated twitter stream that Ghent citizens can check at all times for traffic incidents or any significant updates to regular schedules. It posts information in real-time, as the Waylay engine behind it goes thorugh all the data and identifies relevant traffic data that should be communicated to citizens.The third implementation happens behind the scenes and ensures that abnormal behaviour of all monitored systems is communicated to the centre’s employees so that it can be addressed in a timely manner.

Future plans

This solution is the first-stage implementation of a more ambitious project that the City of Ghent has in plan for its citizens and that is aiming at a highly personalised city-traffic-assistant service to citizens, providing customised information and recommendations based on preferred routes, routine destinations and more.

This will be further developed as part of the TMaaS project, a multi-partner, EU funded smart city project where Waylay is also a key technology contributor.


Resources
The mobility dashboard (NL)
The twitter feed (NL): @verkeergent
The official press release (NL)

In the press
De Standaard
AVS (Belgian TV)