Earlier this week at the Transport Research Board’s Annual Meeting in Washington DC, PTV launched its new Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) Accelerator Programme, a complete portfolio of component technologies for planning MaaS operations all the way to operating and managing MaaS in any given city around the world.

PTV Group’s strategy was explained by Miller Crockart, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing Traffic, “Everyone has heard about the ‘Lisbon study’, in which PTV Group participated as a member of the corporate partner board of the OECD, and the potential implications of the introduction of shared mobility, MaaS and autonomous vehicles. The evaluation of such approaches is essential for all cities, transit operators, fleet operators and automotive OEMs alike.”

“The way we have previously planned for the movement of people and goods has been radically altered with the advancements of these technologies and new ‘shared’ approaches. So being able to, as it were, replicate the ‘Lisbon study’ for each city and potential operator, is something PTV Group has developed as a commercially available software suite capable of quickly and efficiently evaluating MaaS. We are already working with several cities and automotive OEMs on what we call PTV MaaS Modeller studies, which evaluate the introduction, KPIs, and appropriate parameters to allow MaaS, and eventually, fleets of AVs to become part of the overall transport eco-system.”

Crockart continued, “We are unique in that PTV Group understands the demand management side of this topic, and also the routing, scheduling and trip optimization aspects. The reason being, for many years at PTV Group, we’ve addressed the traffic demand management market, and also separately, the logistics and fleet optimization and management market. Bringing these two aspects together has given us the ideal solution to planning, optimizing and operating MaaS, and eventually the full deployment of fleets of autonomous vehicles.”

“That’s only half of the story because not only does one have to plan or model and evaluate the possibility to operate MaaS, one will also then have to integrate it with the overall ‘mobility mix’, operate, regulate and control it. We envision some rather large city operating systems or platforms will have to be constructed, and indeed some are already well underway. There are companies much larger than PTV Group who are well-positioned to develop these mega operating systems. For us at PTV Group, we see ourselves as the key intelligent mobility component provider, and our software programs and optimization technologies have been designed to plug and play within these quickly evolving third party environments.”

“PTV Group’s complete MaaS Accelerator Programme will take a client, or partner, all the way from modeling and evaluating MaaS operations, through to simulating, optimizing actual operations, controlling, and where necessary, integrating with a city or state’s overall mobility platform, or as Crockart coined it in a speech at TRB 2017, in a city’s mobility mix operating system.”

• At TRB’s Annual Meeting PTV Group launched a MaaS Accelerator Programme