The “Attiki Odos” Corridor
Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece. The Athens 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 (with sections that are part of Orient/East Med TEN-T corridor), linking the airport to the Athens city centre, major urban arteries, as well as main intercity motorways with links to multimodal hubs such as the port of Piraeus, the urban railway network, the Athens Metro and other public transport options (buses, trolleys, tram). The motorways’ Traffic Management Centre (T.M.C.) operates on a 24-hour basis, continuously monitoring the traffic conditions along the motorway, and is directly informed of the occurrence of any incidents.

The Athens Urban Transport Organization (OASA) and Attiko Metro (AMETRO) are the bus and metro operators in Athens respectively. OASA operates several lines traversing Attiki Odos with a number of bus stops and has planned to provide an on-demand bus service to the Athens airport. The coordination of this on-demand service will be included in the demonstration case that will be deployed in Athens. AMETRO operates three metro lines, one of which connects to Attiki Odos and connects to the airport.

The Challenge

The different parties currently 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. Furthermore, decisions taken by individual operators may have unexpected impacts on the operations of other stakeholders (i.e. impact of congestion on reliability of public transport) and not be sufficient to fulfil sustainable mobility practices. From the travellers’ perspective, journey information from operators is provided by various systems and applications resulting in reduced usability of all available data sources.

The FRONTIER’s Innovation
FRONTIER aims to bridge the existing gap by:

  1. Implementing measures based on needs and objectives of different stakeholders. A collaborative platform will be realised allowing stakeholders to share data and collectively implement, test and deliver multimodal traffic management strategies and solutions that encourage modal shifts towards public transport and improved sustainable mobility. Different operational structures and business models will be trialled and analysed.
  2. Securing the resiliency of the network’s performance during recurrent and unplanned disruptions by deploying network management strategies at the right place at the right time. A dedicated mobile application will offer services such as multimodal journey planning, virtual variable message signs (VVMS), incident alerts and other.
  3. Optimising planning for short- (sports, concerts, etc.) and long-term (roadworks, disaster management, etc.) events through the use of simulation scenarios. Resilience analysis and formation of pro-active, truly multimodal solutions, reinforcement of weak areas and in-depth preparation against threats will be performed. The impact of future mobility will be explored and opportunities, threats and future synergies will be identified. A set of optimum traffic management strategies that will allow increase of the network’s capacity and efficiency by assigning better the traffic load among existing and future modes will be devised.

Relevant outputs

  • The quantitative and qualitative assessment of the impact of new forms of mobility will be performed.
  • A roadmap for V2I, V2V functionality for future traffic management applications will be planned.
  • An interconnected, integrated and interoperable network of systems and organizations will be assessed.

Keywords

Multi-stakeholder network management, collaborative transport planning, multimodal mobility services, traffic and network management in the presence of CAVs, innovative operational practices and business models.