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Transportation and mobility in smart cities are undergoing a grave transformation as new ways of mobility are introduced to facilitate seamless traveling, addressing travelers’ needs in a personalized manner. A novel concept that has been recently introduced is Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), where mobility services are bundled in MaaS Plans and offered to end-users through a single digital platform. The present paper introduces a recommender system for MaaS Plans selection that supports travelers to select bundles of mobility services that fit their everyday transportation needs. The recommender filters out unsuitable plans and then ranks the remaining ones on the basis of their similarity to the users’ characteristics, habits and preferences. The recommendation approach is based on Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) formalisms combined with cosine similarity techniques. The proposed method was evaluated in experimental settings and was further embedded in real-life pilot MaaS applications. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach provides lists of MaaS PlanMaaS Plans that users would choose in a real-life MaaS setting, in most of the cases. Moreover, the results of the real-life pilots showed that the majority of the participants chose an actual MaaS Plan from the top three places of the recommendation lists.

Rendering transport behaviours more sustainable is a pressing issue of our times. In this paper, we rely on the deep penetration of mobile phones in order to influence citizens’ behavior through data-driven mobility and persuasive profiles. Our proposed approach aims to nudge users on a personalized level in order to change their mobility behavior and make more sustainable choices. To achieve our goal, first we leverage pervasive mobile sensing to uncover users’ mobility patterns and use of transportation modes. Second, we construct users’ persuadability profiles by considering their personality and mobility behavior. With the use of the aforementioned information we generate personalized interventions that nudge users to adopt sustainable transportation habits. These interventions rely on persuasive technologies and are embedded in a route planning application for smartphones. A pilot study with 30 participants using the system for 6 weeks provided fairly positive evaluation results in terms of the acceptance of our approach and revealed instances of behavioural change.

The mobility landscape has changed over the last years with the advent of innovative transportation solutions which are being constantly deployed whereas more are set to emerge in the near future such as autonomous vehicles and flying taxis. In this landscape a new mobility paradigm has come to the forefront during the last years through Mobility as a Service (MaaS). This refers to a seamless integration of various forms of transport services accessible through one single digital platform. The concept of MaaS is aligned with Smart mobility, one of main Smart City components which refers to smart manners of people and goods mobility through the integration of all transport modes, ICT solutions, zero pollution and congestions and so on [1]. A key enabler for MaaS is technology that can provide the means for complex mobility ecosystems to be integrated, while allowing diverse service providers and related stakeholders (e.g. payment management organizations) to perform transactions between each other (for booking, invoicing, payment, etc.) as well as interact with the traveler, acquire and exchange operational data, and process it into information that can be used to support MaaS related business processes. Such an ecosystem can be centrally coordinated when all participants in the value chain have the same understanding of what needs to be delivered and accept to follow a common approach, which can be proprietary, customized and aligned to vendor specific guidelines. As the MaaS ecosystem expands and the coordination of an increasing number of mobility solutions comes into play, the complexity can be such that new decentralized solutions are required. In this work in progress paper we discuss the role of blockchain technology for enabling seamless mobility for MaaS.

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of personalized persuasive interventions to change urban travelers’ mobility behavior and nudge them towards more sustainable transport choices. More specifically, we embed a set of persuasive design elements in a route planning application and investigate how they affect users’ travel choices. The design elements take into consideration the style, the intensity, the target of persuasive interventions as well as users’ characteristics and the trip purpose. Our results show evidence that our proposed approach motivates users on a personal level to change their mobility behavior and make more sustainable choices. Furthermore, by personalizing the persuasive interventions while considering combinations of interventions styles (in our case messages and visualizations) as well as adjusting the intensity of persuasive interventions according to the trip purpose and the transport modes of the routes which the user is nudged to follow, the effects of the persuasive interventions can be increased.

Sustainable mobility has received significant attention over the recent years due to the negative impact of peoples’ transportation habits on the environment and the society, especially in congested urban areas. In this paper, we present our approach for personalized persuasion aiming to nudge travelers to opt for sustainable mode choices. Our approach leverages persuadability profiles comprising of users’ personality and mobility type in order to identify the persuasive strategy that fits best to the user’s profile, and supports transportation decisions towards more environmental friendly routes, by providing targeted interventions in the form of persuasive messages integrated in a route planning application. A pilot study in the city of Vienna showed evidence that the application affects users’ mobility choices.

Current transportation practices are not sustainable as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transport sector are increasing at a faster rate than any other energy using sector, especially in urban environments. Technology based behavioural change interventions towards adopting transportation habits that rely more on the use of public transportation, bicycles and walking and less on private cars can provide the means to reduce GHG emissions, mitigate the effects on the environment and improve the quality of life in urban areas. In this paper, we present our approach to support sustainable transportation decisions and nudge users to select more environmental friendly routes through a set of personalized persuasion services which are embedded in route planning applications. The proposed services leverage a multitude of relevant information elements including user profile characteristics and contextual information in order to nudge users to follow green transportation routes.

Recent approaches on tackling the problem of sustainable transportation involve persuasive systems and applications. These systems focus on changing citizens’ behavior towards adopting transportation habits that rely more on the use of public transportation, bicycles and walking and less on private cars. A main drawback of existing applications is the limited use or lack of personalization aspects that consider differences in users’ susceptibility to persuasive strategies. In this paper, we explore two user traits that can be used for personalizing the persuasive strategies applied to end users: personality and mobility type. More specifically, we present the results of a study where we examined the perceived persuadability of eight persuasive strategies on users of five personality types and three mobility types.

We implemented a recommendation system that presents persuasive messages to commuters using a route planning application. Our aim is to nudge users towards following routes that are environmentally friendly with lower CO2 emissions than those they usually take. Our implementation leverages contextual information and transportation user profiles while the messages are defined based on a set of persuasive strategies. The recommender is integrated in a route planning application for android based smartphones and was used in a trial in the cities of Vienna and Dublin. Users' qualitative feedback showed that the feature was found interesting and provided insights for future improvements.

In modern urban lifestyles the consumption of prepared food in restaurants and fast foods is increasing constantly and is becoming a habit among citizens. One side effect of this way of life concerns the increase of the Body Mass Index because citizens tend to choose more foods with high amounts of energy, fats and saturated fats and less healthy foods such as vegetables and fruits. In this paper we describe an intelligent application called DISYS that aims to offer personalized information to consumers when visiting a restaurant in order to support them to select a dish or a meal that is within their preferences but at the same time is healthy for them and in line with their dietary targets and their health conditions. DISYS is operated by restaurant managers who configure the meals and dishes their establishment offers, as well as the nutritional characteristics of each meal. Moreover, dieticians can support their customers by analysing their actions and interactions with the DISYS application with respect to food consumption habits.

Besides other popular strategies, such as feedback and (social) comparisons, challenges have been proposed and used to influence people’s behavior towards a targeted goal. However, only very limited data on the effectiveness of such approaches and how to best design them is available yet. In this work we report the findings of a two months field study analyzing the effectiveness and perception of challenges in the context of influencing personal mobility. Individual and collaborative approaches towards challenges were studied, and specific focus was laid on what aspect makes users willing to participate in these challenges. Our findings suggest that both individual and collaborative challenges have the potential to sustain the interest of users in using behavior change support systems, that collaborative and individual challenges seem to not attract different types of users, that individual challenges in general are preferred, and that challenges are only a useful means for a subset of users. Also, ICT-competence seems to be an important aspect of being willing to participate in electronically organized challenges.

The demo paper describes the Creative User Centric Inspirational Search, which aims to leverage user inspiration in information seeking activities. CRUISE is an interactive exploratory search tool that combines diversification of content and sources with a user interface design that visualizes cues from the social chatter generated with microblogging services such as Twitter and lets users interactively explore the available information space. The tool is based on the observation that users often use the social chatter to follow links and initiate information seeking activities which can lead to unexpected discoveries which can in turn inspire them.